UC Davis Blum Center for Developing Economies

A few days ago, I accompanied the children to their school. All but two of the children here attend the same public school not very far away. I was under the impression that I was to follow them to school and teach whatever subject where teachers were lacking, so I assumed that the school was fairly small, new, or poorly developed. Instead, the school turned out to be a rather large building with a couple hundred students pouring in from nearby villages. With about two dozen classrooms and just as many teachers, I was more of a guest for the children to stare at rather than any real help. I observed the English teacher and did help teach a couple classes, but with little grasp of the students' prior knowledge and English level, I could only do so much. My greatest contribution was to make the children, who wanted to impress the sister (everyone in Nepal addresses each other as “sister” or “brother”) from America, behave well in the classroom. At one point, a Grade 1 English tea...

Goodness, it has been quite a while since I have blogged. I’m beginning to pack all of these last minute things into my schedule. On Tuesday, I ran an errand for my internship to pick up MetroCards for the clients all the way downtown on 21st and Broadway. I finally decided to try out one of those breakfast food trucks that hang out right outside of the buildings. I finally found the famous Anthora cup! Coffee was only $1, and it was delicious. That afternoon, I met up with my friend, Michelle, from my high school days to catch up and get French macarons at Lauderee with her and took a walk in Central Park. I came across the famous reservoir, and it’s HUGE. Fortunately, we managed to escape from the rain by the time we got home. Fast forwarding to Thursday, I finally had a chance to assist the economic stability workshop at STRIVE. We were helping the students in the class with how to attach resumes, search for their documents on their computer, and how to send an email to a po...

These past two days consisted of me shadowing and assisting the workshops which were mostly about maintaining a healthy relationship with one’s significant other. Yesterday, we explored the definition of conflict and how the participants can solve the conflicts that are going on in their own relationships. On a blank sheet of paper, the participants defined ‘conflict’ to be “a ‘misunderstanding" “miscommunication, “having trust issues", “being selfish" were a couple. An interesting one that was mention was “having no conflict is conflict because if nothing is being said about a problem, then there is no resolution. When examining why people get in conflict, the participants stated that there was a lack of communication, understanding, and clarity, or it could be a matter of ego, expression, and this desire to “push buttons". Using the definitions that the participants came up with, the class was supposed to pick a recent argument and explain how they felt, what mi...

Today was the first time I attended a fatherhood workshop! I was able to watch one of the coordinators host a workshop about healthy relationship building with one’s significant other. There were 4-6 other clients in the workshop. The main intention of the workshop is that it serves as a focus group in which the clients are able to speak about the issues that arise in their relationships with those around them. To start the workshop, the facilitator asked the clients to focus on the definitions of what they think a relationship is. One stated, “a relationship is bond with common ground and association that has long and trust with one another.” Another said, “how a person relates to you with a common interest and relate to one another". Some offered descriptions of what a healthy relationship entails, such as “trust and respect for one another" and “having a mutual understanding with one another is what forms a good relationship". The workshop also focused on discussi...

Two weeks ago we headed to Kampala for Barnabas’ best friend’s wedding. It was a long 12 hour, over-night bus journey to get to Kampala… especially while still struggling with malaria. There used to be a bus that left from Butogota (which is just a few kilometers from Bwindi) to Kampala, but it no longer operates so we had to travel to Kihihi (about an hour) on boda bodas to get to the bus to head to Kampala. By the time we reached Kihihi, we were so covered in dust that even our tears (from the wind blowing in our face) made mud. It made for some good laughs though. We reached Kampala at about 5:30 the next morning and went straight to Hotel Catherine to check in and head to bed. I was pretty sore from sitting in the bus for so long after getting injections in my bum and back for malaria treatment, and from having a fever, that I was ready to lay down in a bed. That afternoon, after some much needed rest, we headed into downtown Kampala for some shopping and to get some food. We wer...

Today marks the beginning of the “hot" days to come. Coming from Davis, 93 degrees does not seem bad at all, but when you add on the humidity, wow, it’s a whole another level of heat. I’m starting to get used to the weather here, but I noticed that the thickness and quality of the air are certainly affecting the health of those around me. Next door to STRIVE is a preparatory school, and right next to that is a dumpster-like area that I always pass by while walking to work. It’s definitely not an ideal place to have a dumpster, the stench is certainly unbearable. Prior to my arrival, I know that East Harlem always had a problem with air quality. As a result, there is a high asthma rate that exists in the area. A few of my co-workers had a hard time breathing and had to purchase asthma pumps to help them get through it. As for my work with STRIVE today, I actually accomplished quite a bit! I spoke to my supervisor last Friday about working more directly with the clients. She agr...

It has only been day 7 of my internship, but already I feel as though I have been fully incorporated into the organization. Yesterday, I had the chance to attend a block party in the Bronx hosted by the Bronx Defenders. Everyone in the community is invited to see what community based organizations are doing in order to serve the community and show what resources they can provide  for individuals. About 15 different CBOs came out and many of them were giving out free burgers, hot dogs, ice cream, freshly printed t-shirts. During the event I was helping to run the STRIVE booth and we were able to get several individuals to sign up to find out more information about our workshops. We will then be contacting them these next few days in order to invite them to sign up for orientation to attend these workshops we have to offer. I think one of the problems that STRIVE is hoping to address is to reach out to potential participants. However, with the help of social media and go...

I’ll start with the negative of today. My MetroCard stopped working. I guess when I was bussing back from Riverside with my co-worker yesterday, the bus that scanned my monthly unlimited card damaged the black strip on it. Now I can’t use it anywhere. The worst part of it is I paid in cash since the teller didn’t accept debit/ credit cards and IN ADDITION refused to give me a receipt. Why didn’t I go to a kiosk? Lines were ridiculously long and that day, many of the kiosks did not accept bills. My friend was once a victim of identity theft because of those kiosks so I didn’t want to take any chances that day. Apparently, MTA doesn’t offer protection for unlimited cards paid in cash… which is frustrating, but I am hoping to get a refund tomorrow through the Customer Service place in Lower Manhattan since it wasn’t my fault. In terms of the rest of my day, it was great working with other student interns that are planning the Fatherhood Image Film Festival in August! The event’s inten...

The past week has been full of memory making. I have settled into my routine and life is simple and great.  Mornings are spent preparing for the day with hot milk tea and bread while examining my bug bites from the night before. I then walk down the red dirt road to the women’s centre with all of the women and the children heading to school. I have been spending my time at the centre cleaning and taking inventory of all the supplies and products to get an idea of our input and output. After the day’s work, I head to the volleyball pitch (Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays) or to Bible Study or Fellowship (Tuesdays and Wednesdays) with my hospital and BDP friends from last year or I just go home to rest and read (Fridays).  After the various evening activities, Barnabas and I prepare dinner and invite over whoever is around to eat with us. Dinner has been liver, chappati, pork, matoke, posho, noodles, or rice lately. Dinner here is always late and morning always seems to come ...

The last few days we’ve been in the field visiting rural villages around Comé, in southwestern Benin, speaking with the women and youth saving groups there. We observed their meetings and had brief interviews with each community agent (who leads the group) and some of the members. The days are 70% driving around to the villages and 30% spending time with the groups, but that 30% has made the whole experience incredible.  Women's savings group meeting Each savings group is a part of Freedom from Hunger’s Savings for Change program, implemented locally by an NGO called BUPDOS. The idea behind the groups is that everyone contributes a certain amount of money each week to the group savings box. Members can then use that money to take out individual microloans with an agreed upon interest rate, typically around 10%. Loans average between $10 and $20. Everyone holds their neighbor accountable and there are fees for missing meetings or payments. Nearly all the women and childre...

I've been back from Lake Atitlan in Guatemala for a few weeks now and a lot has happened. Our proposal to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's P3 program that the Guatemala team at Engineers Without Borders-UC Davis submitted was successful in Phase I! We received a grant award that now is going to fund us for a second trip in September to implement greywater reuse systems in communities around Lake Atitlan. So, for the two months in between we have to prepare. The Phase I of the P3 proposal (the specific phase we passed) is giving us $15,000 to test the banana ring mulch basin technology. We are going to be optimizing a greywater reuse system while also writing a report for Phase II of the EPA's P3 award process. In April, we travel to Washington DC to showcase our optimal system to a panel of judges. If the report and showcase are selected, we will receive $90,000 dollars for full-scale implementation of the system. This is an exciting time....

Tomato greenhouses in village agriculture fields Life is unreliable in Nepal. Roads are either in poor condition or don’t exist at all, electricity shuts off for several hours every day due to load shedding, and labor strikes or protests can shut down transit for an entire day. This makes activities hard to plan. I recently arrived in Nepal for the first time to work on a seed saving project with Professor Kent Bradford’s partner organizations, the Center for Environmental and Agricultural Policy Research, Extension, and Development (CEAPRED) and International Development Enterprises (iDE). My first field visit with CEAPRED was planned the night before and day of our departure. I came with a bag packed, not knowing if we would stay the night or where I would sleep if we did. Village goats and cattle When we drove out of Kathmandu and into the nearby Kavre district, it became clear that we would not reach our demonstration site. After 1.5 hours of driving on dirt roads, th...

Bharatpur is a small city within the Chitwan Valley in southern Nepal.   The bus ride here was a harrowing one through narrow, muddy streets winding up and through the mountains. As frightening as it was at points, the scenery was amazing. The mountains here are incredibly green from all of the warmth and rain, and the way people have managed to live within them are impressive.   We passed many little stores and villages on the way, some poorer than others, but all established. I made a friend with an elderly Nepali gentleman who was sitting next to me on the bus. We hardly spoke until I couldn't resist but take out my iphone to take a picture, at which point he asked me where I was from. He helped me through the rest stops and guided me when I couldn't understand the man directing everyone in Nepali.   I was picked up at my stop by the father and mother of the home where I am staying, Bishnu and Tabita. They seem nice, but I haven't been able to interact wit...

With Ovidio at Lake Atitlan in the Guatemala highlands " Ish kam ", says Ovidio (our driver), as we pass some road kill leaving Canilla, our last interview site. Ovidio is not ethnically Maya, but he proudly shares tidbits and phrases that he has picked up from living in Quiche-Maya territory for most of his life. " Ish kam " or "It is dead" is certainly a phrase that he has heard more than once. In Guatemala, perhaps as in other developing countries, life and death seem more immediate than at home where beginnings and endings generally take place behind closed doors. In Guatemala the proximity of life and death is inseparably tied to faith. Where the common U.S. citizen might perceive danger (i.e. when six year old boys nonchalantly hurl machetes into trees or when a relaxed passenger hangs half his body off a clunky pickup as it swerves around the curves on an uneven road), Guatemalans leave the possibility of deadly accidents up to what Dios quier...

37 Hours Later I'm finally in Nepal! I arrived yesterday at the Tribhuvan airport in Kathmandu. The airport was my first introduction to Nepal, and a striking initial comparison between this country and the others I was traveling from and through. The airport is a comparatively tiny, three-story brick building with no air conditioning and only a few people working to check and supply visas. Whereas the Chinese airports try their best to look as modern and contemporary as possible, the décor of the Kathmandu airport reminded me of my grandparents' home. After navigating through huge, cold, metal and glass structures in Los Angeles and China, the Kathmandu airport really threw me off. I met Sunju, a young-ish Nepali girl who works with the NGO, outside and, after some minor car troubles that required us to switch vehicles, we made it to the hotel. The hotel, or “guest house”, caters to tourists and is surprisingly Americanized. My breakfast this morning was a grilled cheese...

Today was the first day I got to go out into the field and did some outreach for STRIVE! On Mondays and Tuesdays, Riverside Church offers Barber Training Courses, which are led by the Master Barber, Dennis Thomas. The church offers a free six-week barber training program that includes free haircuts to the community to allow the students to practice alongside licensed barbers. Since 1997, Thomas has trained nearly 2,000 people in the basics of barbering which helps job seekers find employment through these skills. STRIVE always refers clients to this program, and today, we attempted to reach out to the program to have them refer their clients to our Fatherhood program at STRIVE. We handed out fliers, spoke to the Master Barber himself, and I took some pictures while my co-worker got his hair cut. It was pretty awesome watching this take place and being part of this experience. It is similar to the concept of teaching people how to fish and seeing how the mentors teach the students h...

Bring a book...because the Kunming airport in China does not have wifi for travelers without a Chinese cell phone carrier. I'm sitting in the Kunming airport, on hour 6 of my 14-hour layover, waiting for the international check-in counter to open. I made the mistake of going to the domestic check-in counter, which opened at 5am. After letting the woman at the counter know that I don't speak Chinese, she directed me to Area H: International check-ins. This process has become all to familiar to me...letting the man or woman know that I cannot understand them because I do not speak Chinese, them taking a look at whatever paperwork or documentation I give them, and then letting me know that I'm not in the right place. For all of the English translated signage, arrows, and directions, navigating foreign airports is very frustrating and difficult. I was confused as to why it was so difficult at first, since I've been to many different airports before and not gotten so l...

Last Thursday we strarted working on the distribution line. Due to current road construction, we had to alter our design so that the pipeline wouldn´t follow the roads as much.  Photo courtesy Kevin Dumler When we were mapping out the new pipeline most of the community members were walking with us, telling us where their land was, where we could cross their land and where they wanted us to start the pipe that would run to their houses. Overall most of the community members are involved in the project and have paid the 150 Bolivianos (about U$21) and are willing to work their required 30 days of work. What has been the most interesting for me is the culture of the Aymarian people (which is an indigenous group here in Bolivia). From what I was told by a couple members in the community, the Aymarians in Quincucirca still speak Aymarian, they uphold communial values such as doing favors for their neighbors, and using the barter system. They also still wear more trad...

Baby Lynne The last few days have been pretty good here in Bwindi. Eve and Denis are still gone so work for R4W is slow right now. I have finished all of the brochures and am halfway done with the new website. Friday was somewhat of a lazy day as I just did a half day of work and then helped Brian do his laundry and watched a movie. On Friday evening Barnabas and I made some noodles and played with the little boys next door before heading to bed. Saturday was another lazy day. Barnabas left early in the morning to see his mother and attend his cousin’s give-a-way party. I spent the day hanging out with Hubert and Brian. We watched another movie, played a few hours of volleyball, and then went to a party that evening at the guest house where I stayed last year. A few volunteers that have been here from the Mayo Clinic were leaving so of course we had to have a dance party. Sunday morning Barnabas returned to Bwindi from home early in the morning and we spent the day doing laund...

¿Cual pais produce mas papas? (China) ¿Y cual pais produce menos papas? (Vatican City!) Jajaja. This is a funny joke in Spanish because "la papa" means potato, and "el papa" means pope.  Yes, we did ask people about how their pope cultivation was going.  Elana in potato field After our initial difficulties finding farmers to talk to in Xela, we ended up having a really successful day of interviews.  A couple of UC Davis Horticulatural Collaborative Research Support Program (HORT CRSP) contacts introduced us to their contacts in Guatemala, and we spent the day interviewing potato farmers with a local agronomist who works for Frito-Lay.  Everyone here has been incredibly generous with their time: people who have never met us have spent hours talking to us about the project, introducing us to their friends and neighbors, and generally helping us out.  Elana, Don Salvador & Kelsey This morning, Rolando took us around to visit a variety of potatoe...

Yesterday I headed to the women’s centre in the morning for some tea and bread and then got to work on designing new web pages. It was a slow morning at the women’s centre because Eve and Denis are gone and the women don’t speak English so I didn’t have many people to talk to. The good news is Amon (my Ugandan cousin) is giving me Rukiga lessons so I have picked up probably another 30 words. You can only ask how someone is doing so many times a day though haha! I headed to the hospital in the late morning to hang out with Brian at the computer lab. I sent Denis the rough drafts of the publications I made so he could look them over and get them printed while in Kampala. After a few hours there, I went back to the women’s centre and met with some Mzungus (an American tourist couple) who were interested in purchasing some products. I didn’t realize how difficult it would be trying to convert American measurements to the metric system and then translating them to the women so they coul...

Nobody tells you international research is easy. In fact, most often, the first thing experienced researchers will say is, “Don’t expect things to go as you planned”.  Don Cesar shows off his GIANT remolaches (beets) Of course this doesn’t make things any less shocking when your long-term contacts are suddenly unable to meet or are medivaced to the US. Despite all prior warnings, it still seems like uniquely bad luck when it happens to you. What people don’t tell you, however, is that in these last-minute, unplanned, situations you are suddenly able to reach out to people you would normally never think to use as resources, and more often than not, we have found that people are incredibly helpful and knowledgeable. After a lifetime of being nervous of calling pizza delivery services for fear I might inconvenience somebody, I find myself suddenly able to cold-call an organization and say, “Hey we found your organization on the internet and we were wondering if you would be willing...

We haven't blogged in a while - not because we don't have internet, but because Carlitos (the tablet) has been having a disagreement with the blog website.  A couple updates: -Elana is better! - I was wrong about the cardamom drying: Turns out the town/general area is full of dryers, so basically everyone dries their cardamom either in their town or the next one over.  I'm super bummed I didn't get to see a dryer, though.  Apparently they are a huge (room sized) semi-circular thing with a mesh bottom.  The cardamom goes on top, and they put a huge wood fire underneath.  Then there is a deisel generator that runs the fan to keep air circulating (because there was no electricity where we were). But - on to Xela.  I love our hostel!  Not only is there free breakfast and hot showers, but our room reminds me of a train car, so I get to live my life long dream of being one of the boxcar children. So everything is pretty great....

Baby blanket sewn by women Life could not be better here in Bwindi. I have recently moved into the village next to some of my good local friends and have a small room to myself. I am a true villager now as I fetch water from the stream near by, use the pit latrine, bathe in a bucket, and cook on a charcoal stove. I wake up each morning to the sounds of the roosters crowing, goats squealing, and babies crying as the sun breaks through the mountain jungle mist. The kids that live next door to me think it is pretty funny to have a Mzungu (white person) living in their village. They love to peak in through my curtain and wait for me to notice them and then they run off giggling. I walk down the red dirt road with all of the women to the centre and begin my work around 8am. We break for tea and bread around 9am and then continue on. The women laugh and chat all day while they pump the sewing machines with their feet, guide the material with their left hands, and nurse their babies wit...