What most of my time in the field is like

Ok, do you want to know what field work is really like? Well, sometimes it's walking through rice fields, sometimes it's talking to farmers, sometimes it's sitting in on meetings.... but that's only a fraction of my time. A much greater fraction of my time is spent trying to find help with things I can't do myself, typically things that require knowing certain people or being Haitian. And waiting, and wondering whether whatever it is I have asked for help with will happen or not.

All this waiting wouldn't be a big problem if I were a patient person (which of course I am not). But even if I were, the waiting gets complicated when I am relying on too many moving pieces that simultaneously rely on each other.

Tomorrow, for example, I want to talk to small groups of farmers to learn more about different things related to farming. Here are all of the different ways I need help from other people to make these groups happen:
1. I need someone to help me run the focus groups. This really has to be done by someone from Haiti who's fluent in the language, and who understands research and focus groups.
2. I've hired people for #1. But before they can start working, I need them to sign a contract with the university we are working with here. So I need someone there to write a contract, get the necessary people together to sign the contract, and show up to sign it.
3. I need someone from the area who knows the farmers to help me find farmers and convince them (to the tune of about $3.50 each) to be in my focus groups.
4. I need someone who understands research enough to know what I want with my focus groups, and who knows person #3, to translate what I want from research-ese to farmer-ese.
5. Finally, I need transportation and lodging. No small task in Haiti.

So I find myself making many conditional plans at the same time: "Ok, we're on for interpreting tomorrow, assuming I can get that meeting scheduled..." and then I call whoever I need to call to schedule my meeting and cross my fingers that I won't have to cancel on the interpreter, or the driver, or whoever. Because when I do have to cancel something, someone always gets mad at me. It's a difficult and frustrating juggling act.

A (weekend) day in the life of a foreigner in Haiti

What do I do when I'm not in the field? Well, here's what I did yesterday:

Morning: grocery shopping at the grocery store that I can walk to from my hotel. I spent $9.50 on a travel-sized bottle of contact solution, $6 on a box of five (small) granola bars, and $13.50 on a 6 oz. bag of baby spinach (and it's not even organic). At least my guesthouse cook told me that the $2 I spent on a gigantic avocado seemed reasonable.

Afternoon: lounging (and working) by the pool at the newly re-opened El Rancho Hotel that had been destroyed in the earthquake. Pros: lovely landscaping, nice pool, delicious salad, and comfy lounge chairs. Cons: slow wifi, loud dance music ALL DAY, and the feeling that I'm in a weird rich-person bubble that 99% of Haitians have never even seen.

Evening: dinner at the Quartier Latin, another foreigner bubble where they serve fresh pasta and French wine, and last night's location for the week-long international jazz festival happening in Port-au-Prince. Even though it is two blocks from our hotel, we had a private driver take us there and bring us back, "just to be safe."

So I'm not exactly roughing it.

Big Game of Chicken

[Note: I wrote this in August, on the plane ride home from my first trip to Haiti, and never posted it. Now I'm starting this blogging thing again, starting with this post from many months ago.]

The other day I was out in a rice field, like usual, trying to learn a little more about the irrigation system. SRI requires more precise water management than traditional rice farming methods, so if farmers are to be successful with it, they will need clean, well-functioning canals. The small canals that run between the farmers’ fields are made of dirt, and they frequently get clogged up with weeds and plant debris that needs to be cleaned.

There is a word in Creole for a bunch of people getting together to do communal work, like cleaning shared canals: kombite. The existence of a word means that there is a precedent for sharing work. I asked them if they ever cleaned their canals together, and they told me they used to have kombites all the time – every week some said, or a few times a season. And now? No, they said, not so much any more.

Why not? I asked. Oh, they said, because some NGO came in last year and paid us to clean our canals. They haven’t come back this year, but now people will only work on the canals if someone pays them to do it.

A canal full of weeds

The farmers tell me that cleaning the canals is the responsibility of the local government agricultural agency, while the agency claims to be responsible only for the large concrete canals that feed each system of smaller dirt canals. But even the agricultural agency is plagued by wait-for-the-NGO-to-do-it syndrome. This year, as part of the SRI project, Oxfam gave the agency some money for cleaning the larger canals. But when the machinery broke down halfway through the project, the agency said they had spent all of the money. It was up to Oxfam to come up with more money to fix the machines and finish the cleaning.

So a big backhoe sits, broken, next to a half-cleaned drainage canal, and the smaller canals are filling up with weeds, while everyone waits for someone else to come in with the money to fix it.

This is partly a story about farmers with insufficient access to public infrastructure and an underfunded government agency. But it is also to some extent a story of donations undermining preexisting local solutions. If farmers cleaned their own canals just two years ago, the benefit of cleaner canals must be worth the work it takes. But why do something for free if you think someone might come and pay you to do it?