The roller coaster ride of field work

On Tuesday morning, we excitedly packed up the truck with piles of papers and a team of four enumerators to go and try it out in three communities in Comarapa, one of which had been involved with Natura. Here’s a day-by-day account of the adventure that is field work in Bolivia.

Survey Test, Day 1: Roller coaster roads. I have spent many hours of my life on windy, bumpy roads around the world. This road is difficult in a unique way. The first hour or two is full of speed bumps so intense that you have to stop before you can go over them. After that, much of the road is smooth and nice – but then you hit these landslides and big gaps in the pavement that jolt you from your enjoyment of the beautiful view and throw you around the car for a minute. Then it gets smooth again for just long enough to get back up to full speed, and then BOOM, another one. For some reason this speeding up and slowing down is much more frustrating than a road that is just bumpy and slow all the time.

Survey Test, Day 2: Top of the roller coaster, everything is great. After some meetings with the mayor of Comarapa and a representative of the water cooperative, we headed out to meet with Quiñales, the first of three communities where we hoped to do our surveys. They were happy to participate, so we make a schedule of which houses we’ll go to the next day, and head off to Verdecillos, community #2, where they are already having a meeting that we hope to take advantage of. They are less receptive, a little wary of an organization they don’t know wanting information about the community. Fortunately, we had come with a technician from Natura who knows the area, and he helped smooth things over, explaining why it was so important for us to learn about the community in order to be able to help them – and by the end, they seemed willing to cooperate and said they would be waiting in their houses on Friday when we came back. Sweet – one day, and we are all set up for surveys in two communities! This is going to be great.

Survey Test, Day 3: Things go downhill fast. Before going into a community to do a survey, it’s important to have some key information – things like how many families live there, where their houses are, what language they speak. When we met with Natura’s technician back in Santa Cruz, he chose some communities for us and said he’d set it all up so that we could get the surveys we needed. The information we had was the names of the communities, and the supposed number of families in each one, and that was it. In our meeting in Quiñales, they told us all the houses are close together, and everyone knows where everyone else lives – great, we thought, we can drop our enumerators off at their first house on the list and from there they can just ask where the next one is, and continue like this all day. First problem: the houses were not anything like close together, so our enumerators spent much of the day walking all over, trying to find houses and trying to find us – and of course there is no cell phone service. Second problem: of the 47 families that we were told live in Quiñales more than half actually live in Comarapa and just have land in Quiñales. So we couldn’t even find enough houses, let alone enough where people are home and available to spend an hour and a half answering our questions. So Stella and I spent the day trying to keep track of our four enumerators who were all over the community, trying to find houses to send them to, hoping that after they walk half an hour to find a house that they find someone there. Third problem: a lot of people in Quiñales don’t speak Spanish. When we got back to the office, the guy who is supposedly helping us said oh yeah, a lot of people around here only speak Quechua. And now is a better time to tell us this than when we had our meeting back in Santa Cruz to choose communities to visit? We felt like we had been sent to these communities, with a whole team of enumerators no less, with no information and no support, and had serious doubts about doing back to Santa Cruz with any data that we can use. Things are not looking good.

Today is actually Day 4, but I´ll leave you in suspense until next post because this is already really long.