Day 4 (Jan. 1) – Systems Change

Happy to be alive!

(before, during, and especially after hiking the Aravali foothills)

“Where is the path? This is no path! There is no path!” Uday repeated.

We were all laughing because it was true. We returned to Karech today, this time to trek with the women as they gathered wood from the managed forests. This was my second wood trek, but boy oh boy was this a much more treacherous hike than the time before. Like Uday said, there really was no path to walk on as we followed the women to collect wood. We were literally traversing the side of a mountain. Rocks gave way around my feet. I watched as one tumbled down the cliff until I could no longer see it skipping down the wall. At that same moment, one of the guys asked about the Ironman keychain on my backpack.

“Yep, I’ve done a few half-Ironman races, but this, what we are doing right now, this is crazy!”

I could tell our group was slowing down the women. I felt bad for holding them up, but my legs were quite shivery. Slow and steady was the only way to complete this race. Fortunately, we all made it safely to the wood collection area. The women then used axes they brought with to cut up this preselected dead tree. They tied up the wood into bundles and placed one atop each of their heads for the entire trek back.

Me trying to carry a bundle of wood on my head.

At one point along the way, the eldest women had me try carrying her bundle on my head. I could hardly bare the wait, let alone walk with it along our pathless voyage back. I knew she wouldn’t understand me but I said it anyways, “You are amazing.”

Each bundle weighed about 50 pounds. A single bundle provides about a day’s worth of cooking and heating energy for one home. As a result, wood is collected nearly every day of the year, except during the monsoon season (June-Sept.). Mothers often had their kids come with so they could help gather additional wood to be stockpiled for the rainy season.

Just hugging trees, trying to estimate the diameter of a bundle of wood. A little help please! Ruler anyone?

Later on in the day, I was sitting with one woman in her kitchen. Just like I do at home, I sat gazing into the fire. She was boiling maize when finally, I decided to ask the same question I asked three years ago. Pratiti, the FES fieldwork leader, translated for me.

Sitting and chatting in the kitchen with several ladies as 

one woman boils maize over her wood-burning fire. 

I asked, “If you had a stove that could cook food whenever you wanted without wood, would you still collect wood?” Her answer was no.

I was shocked! Excited! And full of questions. I learned that wood is no longer traded for buttermilk as before. Families now own their own livestock because there is enough fodder in the forest to support domestic animals. It was interesting to hear that the reason families in Karech didn’t have cattle prior was not because they couldn’t afford the cows, but rather they didn’t have any means of feeding the cows. It was neat to see how restoration efforts led by FES have developed the lands and as a result, have provided income for rural families from their buttermilk-producing cattle.

The family had more great news to share. The two sons in the family were benefitting from NREGA, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (which guarantees 100 days of work each year upon request to the government, or compensation if there is no work available within 15 days of the request). Both men were able to land profitable jobs in the city doing construction work. They were earning about Rs 300 per day (about $5). They each owned a Honda motorcycle and a cellphone. For this family, and many others in Karech, wood was no longer much of a bartering tool after all.

What did I learn from this? Villages are not static islands separate from the world!! Just like towns and cities everywhere, village systems change rapidly. I am amazed by how much has changed in Karech since my first visit in 2011. I am inspired by the human and governmental efforts that have combined to make a difference in the lives of these rural families.

So where does this leave us? In a busy state of reactionary processing! We are all gearing up to recalibrate our methods, adjust our designs, and reschedule our research plan based on the current state of the system. What happens next is to be continued…    

Day 3 (Jan. 31) – Storytelling

For the past three years, Uday and I, along with a handful of other engineers at the University of Iowa, have been developing a solar cooker with thermal storage. Our thinking: by coming up with the best solar cooker possible, we could provide a sustainable cooking alternative to save the trees. We have been motivated based on our hypothesis that harvesting wood for cooking is the cause of deforestation in Karech.

After yesterday’s meetings with FES, I’m not sure our hypothesis is completely correct. Cutting trees for cooking and heating may only be part of a much more complex and systemic story. If this is the case, then nothing is more important than getting a better handle on the whole story. It does no one any good to cling steadfast to a scheduled research plan if the very core of the study (our hypothesis) is a matter of reproof. For if we charge ahead right now, I fear whatever proposed solution we end up with (solar cooker or otherwise) will likely be of no match to solve the actual problem we set out to address in the first place.

For this reason, the research plan Uday and I developed this fall is currently on hold (and could very well change based on what we find out next). What is next? My suggestion for the day was to do some visual resource mapping. Pictures can capture stories sometimes far better than words themselves can tell. Right now, we could really benefit from the story of the trees…just how much wood is being collected, and from where and for what purposes?

And so our day began. We left base camp in Udaipur and headed out to the forests in Karech. It’s about a two and a half hour bus ride from the city to the village. Then, another hour or so walk to one of the protected forests in the village.

Over the farmland and to the woods... 

As we were making our way to the forest, I became very quiet and deeply lost in thought. Uday came alongside me and confessed, “I’m so confused, overwhelmed my all of this information! I don’t know what to think right now.”

“Allison,” he said. “Confusion is the precursor to clarity.” Indeed.

The more I learn—especially as I challenge myself to understand the social, cultural, and economic underpinnings of this story—the more I realize I have so much more to learn! But by broadening my perspective, things start to make more sense. Like the name of this blog. Wide lens. Clear focus. I was again confident, and still confused.

Woman collecting water at a well. 

She used a cheese cloth to filter the water.

 

Eventually we made our way to helicopter peak, the best vantage point to see the contrast between protected and unprotected forest lands. I was encouraged because the difference between the two areas was far more apparent than it was three years ago. The restoration efforts led by FES seemed to be working. The protected lands looked great, full of tress that were luscious and green! (As a side note, protected forests are regions governed by strictly enforced rules that regulate wood collection. While FES helps inform forestry management policies, the rules themselves are established, formalized, and policed by all the tribes within and surrounding the village.)

The Great Wall of Karech

A stone wall separates the unprotected forest (left) 

from the protected forest (right).

While resting for a bit, an interesting oral history began to unfold. One of the village leaders shared rich history about the forest. He said there was a severe, seven-year drought in the 1980’s that completely devastated their agriculture. In need of food, community members started cutting down massive amounts of trees. They burned with wood in kilns to form coal, and then sold it to Muslim contractors about 7 kilometers away. The money they made from this process was used to buy food from merchants who came by way of camels.

So what does this story mean for us? We do indeed need to revise our hypothesis. I think we have much to learn from the history books, especially reports on the rainfall and drought in Karech from 1950 to today.  

After the community leader concluded his story, we resumed our trek through the forest just in time for our meeting to construct a resource map. At least 25 women, children, and men showed up for the meeting. We congregated in the middle of a dirt road at the base of one of the wooded hills. It was one of the most scenic meeting locations I’d ever experienced. But more beautiful than the natural world around us was the resource map that began to take form across the width of the road.

 

Resource map being drawn out by community members

using vibrantly colored powders.

 

Women used vibrant powders to paint a picture of their community, including their homes, the protected forest lands, roads, water wells, farmlands, the wildlife sanctuary, managed forest lands, revenue wastelands, and the village boundary. It was fun to watch them draw the map, especially when others joined into to help mix vibrant powders to form additional colors.

 

Interpreting the map to understand resource flows.

 

Once completed, one women used the map and a pointing stick to show the flow of resources within, into, and out of the village. It was particularly interesting to learn where each of the three community groups (habitats) in Karech gathered their wood.

As beautiful as this all played out, I must say that it seemed a bit too routine, like they had drawn up this map for various groups many times before. I am also somewhat weary about the content of the message translated because one man tended to instruct how the women drew up the lines. Nevertheless, I gained a lot of valuable information from the process and learned that fieldwork is about keenly observing EVERYTHING.

I am so thankful and inspired by stories people shared with me today. Cheers to a great day, a great year! And as for my New Year’s resolution? In 2015, my resolution is to read and listen to more stories, share and cherish stories, be in many others’ stories, but above all, be a part of great things so that when it comes time to write my own story, I have a meaningful tale to tell.

Day 2 (Jan. 30) – Lab work is clean, fieldwork gETs MEsSy

To quickly clarify from my previous post, Day 1 breaks down to this:

ü  Iowa City to Chicago: 4-hour bus ride (survive malfunctioning A/C system)

ü  Chicago to Delhi: 14-hour direct flight (enjoy the coziness of economy class)

ü  Delhi to Udaipur: 12-hour overnight bus ride (witness traumatic car crash and midnight brawl)

 

Miss-communication left us stranded on the side of a highway for a couple hours in Delhi as we waited for our bus to Udaipur. Best (worst) bus stop imaginable.

 

 …& so the story continues from “Day 1” to Day 2, our first working day in Udaipur. Uday (engineer), Matt (anthropologist, archeologist), and I (engineering student, global health studies focus) met in the morning to clarify our key research questions:

 

v  How do different groups interact with the same technology?

v  How do social and cultural issues play into and affect the usage of technology?

v  What are the demographics of region we are studying (community structure, movement of people, socioeconomics)?

v  What are the proportional causes of deforestation in this region?

 

My follow-up question…how can we answer our questions? Language was at the forefront of our conversation. There are literally hundreds of spoken languages in India. For example, Hindi is recognized as the national language and is commonly spoken in northern India. However, most people living in rural regions of northern India speak their own tribal language and do not know Hindi. (India used to be a complete jungle, so communities formed remotely and independently of one another. A diverse collection of languages resulted.)

 

Protected forest land in Karech village (a picture of what most of Rajasthan used to look).

 

We were going to need translators, from English to Hindi, and then Hindi to each unique tribal language. This was no surprise to Uday and I. But in talking with Matt, an expert in conducting participatory interviews, I now fear that much of what we gather from the women in villages will literally get lost in translation. Accents, tones, inflections, passion, sarcasm, seriousness, genuineness, all of these social subtleties do not translate well. For example, there is a difference in meaning between a “YES!” and a “well I suppose so, yeah.” There is also a difference between a “yes” from a woman because there is a male in the room, especially when the true answer is no but such a reply cannot be spoken or accurately translated. In all of these cases, the message on the receiving end is the same: yes. More than ever before I am concerned the information we gather will be a flat compression of the truth, a juicy story after all the juices have been squeezed out.  

Another challenge, perhaps more perplexing than the first, is the population we have selected to sample. Our experimental design involves a total of nine homes, three homes in the village of Karech, three homes in the town of Gogunda, and three in the city of Udaipur. Each of the nine families have been carefully selected for us by our partners called the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES), a local nongovernmental organization that combines human and government efforts to restore and conserve land and water resources for ecological sustainability in rural villages across India.

Me and my new friends.

As an outsider, I have been advised and whole-heartedly agree that having some sort of a local connection to the people I hope to interact with for research is a precursor to international fieldwork. The logic makes sense: it takes time to develop good working relationships with people. A local organization can provide access to long-established ties from which there can and often is immediate mutual trust. I do not take lightly the privilege I have when I come, am trusted by the people who give up their time to help me, and benefit graciously as an extension of this well-established relationship.

But what…what if the very relations I seek are actually biasing our findings? I ask this because the people we are engaging in our fieldwork are well trained by FES to say and do things based on FES’s approach to economic land development. Whether this is good or bad is not the point. What is of importance is considering the extent to which the long-term relationship FES has had with this particular village may be skewing the perspective we gather. If the significance of any study depends on random sampling, then how significant can our findings be?

 

First all-group planning meeting with FES in Udaipur.

For multiple reasons, the three of us quickly realized we need to texture our investigation with as many raw connections as possible. Otherwise, the information we gather may not be an average depiction of the aggregate. If one thing is for sure, it’s this: We face great obstacles and many limitations now that we are working outside of our research lab. I anxiously proceed…with caution.

Day 1 (Dec. 27-30) – Back in India!

*Note: The following series of posts were scribed in real-time but posted after-the-fact due to poor internet connection at my hotel in India. Please reference the date included in the post title for a truer sense of time. Thanks! 

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Today marked the beginning of unimaginable events. It marked the start of my second study in the rural areas surrounding Udaipur, a moderately-sized city with two million people. This western Indian city is geographically situated beneath a mountain range that separates the desert in the north from the semi-arid land in the south. The remaining forests skirting the mountain range act as the last wall, the final buffer zone protecting these remaining productive lands from becoming barren. It is ground zero for climate change, and thus an important battlefield to fight against deforestation for the advancement of public health. In the coming weeks, my mission is to capture and record information as I learn more to help understand and explain why.

Women carrying a day's collection of wood home from a managed forest in Karech village.

 

To begin: The first time I traveled to Udaipur was back in December of 2011. At that time, I was a student taking International Development in India, a course focused on developing a solar cooker that could provide a technological solution to the human and environmental health concerns associated with harvesting and burning firewood for cooking in rural communities. The fact that this seemingly simple problem-solution scenario continued to persist on a large scale across much of India motivated me to find out what was complicating the situation.

I was eager to learn more about the problem, more than just the proposed technological solution we offered with low-tech solar cooking devices. My call for contextualized understanding came from exploring system dynamics – the flow of people, energy, and products into and out of a system with recognition of all related ecological and health impacts. Of all the flows, the movement of wood became my most fascinating fixation.

I learned that wood was far more than fuel for cook fires. It was a traded commodity, a bartering tool to obtain buttermilk and other resources from larger villages and nearby towns. This realization became clear from a conversation I had with a woman in the village of Karech. I asked the mother if she owned a solar cooker, a stove that worked without wood, would she continue to collect wood. Her answer was a surprising yes. That was the moment my elevated, rosy-eyed perception of engineering was rightfully reigned in.

Pivotal lesson learned: Engineering was not going to be capable of saving the day. Though, nuanced with the expertise of other problem-solving disciplines, engineering could play a contributing role.

This lesson has played out in the formation of our new research team. So now I fast-forward three years ago to today,  and I am thrilled to commence my second round of studies working with engineers AND an anthropologist, archeologist, geographer, ecologist, political scientist, urban planning specialist, gender studies graduate, and international studies majors with focuses in sustainability and human rights.

We are diverse. We are on mission. And together, we are ready to dive deeper in the complex system dynamics my research adviser and I began to uncover just prior to leaving India in January of 2012. I have four weeks in India this second go around. The time is now. Let the work (and fun) begin!

Strolled into town on camelback...a slight stretch, but a good first sign for a joyful journey ahead.

 

Why this blog

Hello and welcome! Wide Lens Clear Focus is a blog I created today after years of inspiration from many people and places. I hope to capture and share sound bites and visuals in my collective (somewhat eclectic, yet remarkably cohesive) experience as it rapidly grows and moves in all sorts of exciting directions.


Experience has colored my perspective, widened my lens, and cleared a focus to carefully consider what matters most to me: creation, relations, adventure, & health. I have a background in engineering and global health with touch points in the United States, India, Cameroon, England, and China. My primary fields of interest span the gaps we must bridge between the sciences of technical and social expertise. I look forward to being a team player to achieve a kind of sustainable development that can energize our finite existence on Earth.