In Haiti, I am like a child

Those of you who know me probably know that while I generally prefer doing things with other people to doing things by myself, I'm usually pretty capable of accomplishing basic tasks like feeding myself and finding my way around new places on my own. In Haiti, the exact opposite is true.

Yesterday I walked out of my hotel to do some shopping all by myself for the very first time since I arrived here four weeks ago. It was so refreshing to actually be able to go somewhere all by myself. Before this weekend, I was always shuttled around Port au Prince by a private Oxfam driver. I would just tell them what kind of food I want for dinner, or what kind of errand I need to run, and they would figure out where I need to go and take me there. And they would wait for however long it takes before they have to take me wherever I need to go next. While it makes me feel kind of fancy to have a chauffeur at my beck and call, it's a little stifling.

Traveling in Haiti isn't like traveling anywhere else I've been. There are no international tourists here, except for Haitians living abroad who come back to visit. While not particularly surprising (have you ever considered vacationing in Haiti?), it makes for an unusual traveling experience. Everything is crazy expensive. It's really hard to find food in a lot of places. For two nights I stayed in a town with no restaurants, so the chauffeur took us to a convenience store where we bought cookies and peanut butter for dinner. In Port au Prince I buy single-serving yogurts for more than $4 because the only yogurt you can get is imported from the US. (Food prices are high for lots of complicated reasons - but that deserves its own post). Getting around and doing anything on your own is kind of hard because foreigners just don't do it. I did take public transportation when I went to the beach a couple of weekends ago, but people thought it was kind of weird.

I'll sign off now because my chauffeur is coming early in the morning to pick me up to go back to the field!

A visual tour of SRI

I've been thinking and reading and writing about the System of Rice Intensification (SRI - explained a bit here) for the last few months, so one of the cool things about being in Haiti is getting to see it in practice. And getting to share it with you, my faithful reader(s).

Regardless of which system a rice seed is destined for, it begins its life in a nursery, typically a small section of one's plot. You can see one here, in the middle of the picture:

While your seedlings are starting, the remainder of your land gets tilled - twice. In the picture above, they haven't tilled yet because they haven't had water for a few days.

If you're doing SRI, you then trace gridlines, 20cm apart, across your plot. These gridlines are a guide for transplanting the rice seedlings. This is important because with SRI, you have to weed a lot, and if you have straight lines you can (theoretically) use a mechanical weeder. Once you've drawn your grid you transplant individual seedlings, 8-12 days old, in a grid pattern. (This is very different from traditional rice, in which big clumps of seedlings, several weeks old, are transplanted at random and closer together.) Here's what it looks like:

See how tiny the seedlings are?

And then the teeny seedlings multiply! Here are some seedlings that are about a month old:

The other notable thing about SRI is that you let the soil dry out for a few days at a time, then flood for a week or so, cycling through wet and dry periods. Dry periods aerate the soil and encourage the roots to reach down to look for water, which makes the plant stronger. 

But there are two problems with this flooding and drying cycle. When the field is dry, weeds pop up, so you have to spend a bunch of time weeding. It also requires an ability to manage your water pretty carefully: you have to be able to drain your water off of your field at the right time, and you have to have access to water when it's time to flood again. These two challenges are basically the foundation of the research I'm doing here. Stay tuned.

Here's what a field of SRI looks like. Notice the straight(ish) lines:

For contrast, here's a non-SRI field, which stays flooded all season.

And then, if all the SRI evangelists are right, the SRI plants will grow up big and strong and produce more rice than you know what to do with! I won't be here to see that, at least not on this trip.

My quest for information

In the age of wikipedia and google, it's easy to think that if there's information out there in the world, we can have it. Instantly. But remember back when things were on paper, or just in people's heads?

My main goal for the past week or so has been to learn as much as I can about the blocks of land (agricultural parcels in this area are divided into blocks, based on the distribution of the irrigation canals) that we are considering for expansion of the project. Oxfam has introduced SRI in two blocks this year, and we want to expand into more blocks next year - the hard part is choosing the blocks. So I'm trying to learn anything I can about the blocks: how many people are part of the irrigation association, whether there are any other organizations operating in the area, how well their drainage canals work, topographic and agronomic characteristics, etc.

I've been told that some agronomists who work for the local development agency have some of this information, and that there might even be maps and aerial photos of the blocks we're considering, but the people at the development agency don't answer their phones. Voice mail is one of the things I really miss from home. I've met with the committee of the irrigation association that serves all of the blocks we're looking at, but they don't like to acknowledge differences between the blocks. They tell me that everyone has the same problems with water management, that everyone is actively involved in the association, that everyone has a lot of flooding - eventually they told me to stop asking the same questions over and over because they're just going to give me the same answers for every block.

So what's next? I can try going to the development agency that won't answer their phones and hope to find someone there, but nobody is at work today because of tropical storm Chantal. I can also skip over the committee and go straight to the farmers to ask them questions - but nobody is in the fields today either because of the storm. So today I'll read my Creole phrase book and do some yoga and wait for the storm to pass and start again tomorrow.

Haiti: First Impressions

Ok, I'm going to try out this blogging thing again. I've been in Haiti for two weeks now, so it's about time I guess.

Perhaps I should start with why I'm here. To study rice, of course! Haiti is a mostly agricultural country that imports more than half of their food, including most of their rice. (Thank you US farm bill - more on that in a later post...) Haiti's hunger and food insecurity problem is multi-dimensional and is going to require a lot of solutions to work at the same time (probably more on that later too), one of which is improving agricultural productivity. So that's why I'm here.

Specifically, I'm studying an alternative rice production mechanism called the System of Rice Intensification (SRI). In short, it's a method that requires more careful management, and more labor, but less of everything else: seeds, fertilizer, pesticides, and water. And depending on which study you read, the yields may be much higher. So the most basic question I'm trying to answer is whether people are better off if they switch to SRI once you account for the differences in both yields and expenditures on inputs and labor. Then there are more questions that I hope to get to: Who chooses to adopt SRI, and who doesn't, and why? SRI requires careful water management, so do we see (or what can one do to promote) cooperation among neighbors over shared water systems? How do adoption rates and success with the method change over time as people learn more about it? And probably more...

I'll try to post updates on what I'm doing as I go along. My blogging may be more sporadic than in the past due to the rarity of both electricity and internet, but I'll do my best!

The first thing that greeted me in the Port-au-Prince was band that had both a banjo and an accordian in it - I learned later that this style of music is called twoubadou - and of course I knew I would like Haiti. I also thought there has to be some kind of joke here, like Haiti is the place where we send all the things we have no use for any more, like the old school buses and used clothes, and even the banjos and accordians. I bet it won't be long before I see some oboes.

Since then I've been wandering in rice fields, talking to farmers, trying to learn a few words in Creole, and eating mangoes whenever I can find them.

A much-delayed final post

I meant to go through my pictures and write some kind of final thoughts on my time in Nepal during my epic flight back to the States (which involved 21 hours in four airplanes, 15 hours in five airports on three continents, and three trips through customs). But tragedy hit my poor little macbook:

and I was forced to watch a bunch of bad movies instead. I got my computer back yesterday with a brand-new shiny screen, so I'm finally posting a few last pictures.

I'll be putting the blogging on hold while I'm not globe-trotting, but I imagine I'll pick it up again next time I go off adventuring somewhere. For now I'll be focused on getting through math camp!

Eating my way through Nepal

I've gotten some questions about what I'm eating over here. I thought I'd answer in pictures. There are a few long captions where I describe what I'm eating, so you should look at these full-size if you want to read those.

Transition

A few people have asked me if it will be hard to adjust to life back home after being here. Nope, I say, not at all, thinking about the friends and family and fresh salads waiting for me at home.

It used to be. At the end of my semester in Brazil we had a whole session on re-adjusting and dealing with culture shock. I remember being shocked by the variety in the supermarket, the hot water right out of the tap, and the clean, quiet streets. But the harder part was being overwhelmed by my own wealth and privilege after seeing such desperate poverty and trying to grapple with how unfair it all is and how big and complex the world’s problems are.

I don’t think it’s that I’ve become immune to these things. I spent the bus ride to my field site listening to This American Life’s take on the hopelessness of fixing Haiti and I started crying because I was looking out the window at pretty much the same hopeless story, halfway around the world. Talking with impoverished farmers about the challenges they face, watching flies crawl all over their children, wondering how we can possibly fix everything hasn’t gotten less sad – if anything, the more I learn, the harder it gets as I realize just how much we’re up against.

But some self-preservation is necessary. I have to be able to walk away from it sometimes and enjoy my own life or my career will be very short-lived. That means going to the fancy $7 dinner expat restaurants here sometimes, and it means not bringing all the weight of what I see here with me when I go home.

So I’ve gotten used to going back and forth between two worlds. It’s like I have one self that walks into traffic and brushes my teeth with bottled water and one that expects youtube videos to load instantly and eats raw vegetables. And a 34-hour flight will be more than enough time to switch back.