UC Davis Blum Center for Developing Economies

Here you will find updates on our organization, and blog posts written by each of our Blum Fellows about their experiences abroad. Make sure to check out our website at blumcenter.ucdavis.edu, and like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/UCDavisBlumCenter to get regular updates and see our upcoming events.

Having surveyed for approximately two weeks and called 138 numbers, it was challenging to receive only 35 responses. However, the survey process as a whole reveals a lot about the community and is a jumping-off point for future surveying. In addition to writing a short report and an upcoming final report for the Blum Center, I will have a closing phone conversation with my project manager tomorrow. What has lingered closest to me since the completion of my IRC internship are certainly the profound, though completely foreign to me, challenges pointed out by multiple clients of the IRC. For example, one client impressed upon me the inaccessibility of affordable halal meat. He can only purchase it in specialty food stores and even there the price is unreliable. He noted that he should be able to buy it at large chain stores, where clients may otherwise shop, like Walmart. I had never considered how it may be restrictive to buy only halal meat and how larger stores should take that into ...

At this point in my project I have incorporated my supervisors notes into the first draft of the survey, asked questions regarding his changes, and begun to survey clients. Many of the changes he made were for the purposes of brevity and clarity. He removed the questions I had in place regarding favorite foods and whether the interviewee was the primary shopper, as well as an experimental question about community meals. He also managed to consolidate the multiple questions I had regarding food insecurity that were separated whether they interrogated price, unavailability or distance. I questioned these changes as I was concerned about the knowledge gap between shopper and interviewee that one report mentioned and elucidating rich responses to all aspects of food security. However, I ultimately incorporated each of his changes. At this time I have called 80 numbers intending to administer the survey with only 10 respondents. Their answers are so far similar in nature and offer good gu...

This August 2017 I am interning with the IRC to complete a project around food security and food preferences for the resettled refugee clients of the IRC. I will be designing a survey based on background reading in order to assess the primarily Afghani community of recent migrants. These surveys hope to address the potential location and offerings of a farm stand which would sell fresh produce and cater to the community. I will survey over the phone and collect responses which will lead me to make a results summary and recommendations going forward. Following months of thought and preparation, I am elated to experience this project come into being. The most surprising aspect of the experience, is, without a doubt, its seeming simplicity despite my previous conceptions that it would be much more complicated. In fact, its arc and development seems to hang, easily suspended before my eyes. It is so clear. I look forward to watching it unfold. Only a week into the process I have r...

Despite seeing and focusing on all the negatives that exist in the public school system in India when it comes to teachers, including teachers who didn’t understand the subject matter, and who were unenthusiastic and unsupportive of their students, there were many that I met who were extremely dedicated, and continue to be an inspiration to me as I work on this project. In the first school I visited on my first day in India this year, I met Savitha, a second-grade teacher who is incredibly dedicated to making sure her students have the opportunities that she herself did not have growing up. As a child, she went to a public Tamil-medium school and did not receive a comprehensive English education. Once she was ready to join the workforce, she found herself at a disadvantage for that reason. When she became a teacher, she learned English on her own time and developed a lot of her own English learning material, making sure every student understood each topic they covered before moving o...

When you look at big problems from a distance, it’s easy to think of a simple solution that should, in theory, work perfectly. However, it’s only when you actually talk to the people facing the problem, and put yourself in their place, that you realize how complicated it can really be. For instance, let’s take the issue of poverty in India. Through some research, I found that one of the many causes of poverty is the language divide that is created based on whether or not you know English. Around 60% of students who attend elementary school in Tamilnadu attend Tamil medium schools. Students attending public, government-run schools in rural areas have very little exposure to English, and often have teachers who themselves are not fluent. They do not have any extra reading material that are set in the context of their lives making it difficult for them to acquire even a basic proficiency in the language. This becomes a problem not just for pursuing higher education, but also severe...

When I was younger, my mom had the crazy idea to homeschool my brother and me for a year in India to experience the culture and to give us a chance to connect with our roots. As much as thirteen year old me was upset at the idea of missing out on the all-important social events of the eighth grade, it really was a life changing experience. During that year, I volunteered at Olcott Memorial High School , a school in Chennai that is funded by the Theosophical Society of India. To quote their website, the school’s goal is “social change through the education of the underprivileged.” I noticed while I was there how much the students were struggling to learn English because they did not have any exposure to the language outside of school, the teachers themselves were not very fluent, and on top of that, they didn’t have many resources, like books, that were actually relevant to their lives. Not learning English is a problem because while students can learn subjects in Tamil, an...

My original plan coming here was to have a resource database tailored toward the children who are part of FNE’s program called Salud Para Todos los Niños, which provides specialty pediatric care for children with chronic conditions such as cerebral palsy and Down syndrome. However, I had to alter some parts of the draft after speaking to some of the clinic faculty in Chacraseca and members of FNE who thought it would be a better idea and more useful to construct the database for the general patient population of Le ó n and Chacraseca. After I completed the final draft of the resource assessment, it took about a week and a half before it was approved by FNE. At that point, I was already halfway through my time in Nicaragua, so I had to start collecting surveys right away. My goal was to get at least 50 completed- 1 assessment per family- before I left. This undertaking had its own challenges. I was doing the assessments with Josue, the coordinator of Salud Para Todos los Niños and ...

The jeep was maneuvering its way through the main city of Managua. The air was hot and heavy, but the clouds were starting to roll in. It was rainy season in Nicaragua, and the rain (which was unusually punctual- it almost always came at around 6pm everyday) provided a temporary relief to the heat. I was with Rebecca, one of the board members of FNE International, which was the NGO I was working with. We were on our way to Le ó n, my home base in Nicaragua where I would be doing most of my work. We arrived about two hours later. The first thing I noticed were the women carrying baskets of fruit on top of their heads. I could barely balance a book. The cars’ ceaseless honking, people yelling their merchandise out loud like “Aguacateee!” or “Sapote! Sapote!”, the colorful painted walls of revolutionary heroes, the streets full of locals and tourists, and the sound of reggaeton in the background coming from one of the air conditioned department stores. It was a whir of life and it was re...

Precision Planter project Blum Fellow Stephanie Lew Botswana Summer 2017 Today we hitched a ride with some people into town because we needed to go to the bank to get money to pay for rent. They dropped us off at the bank and told us to meet them at the Kalahari Arms Hotel when we were done. We called and asked them how long they’d be and they said 10-15 minutes. The wait ended up being more than an hour. Also, I was expecting the excursion to take an hour or two but it ended up taking nearly 6 hours—which was basically our entire day. Furthermore, we may agree on a time to meet and do work, but people here are generally 15 min-1 hour late. These experiences highlight miscommunication in regards to time and timeliness that I think stem from cultural differences.  Back at home I’m used to living a lifestyle in which I am always on the go. There are days where I have things booked every hour of the day, so 15 minutes makes a difference. When I’m here I find myself getting...

Precision Planter project Blum Fellow Stephanie Lew Botswana Summer 2017 International aid is something that is so tricky, and throughout this trip I’ve been struggling to understand what my place is within development and how I can truly help others. Historically, international aid has failed, and I think it largely ties into this idea presented in this proverb: If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, but if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. From my understanding, development has failed because we simply give fish out; we don’t each how to fish. In the same way, we pour money and resources into a place, and they become dependent on it. All of the money and resources we’ve contributed to the growth and development of other countries has never been sustainable because it doesn’t grow social and economic capital of a country. With this idea in mind, I have been very conscious about how I choose to help others within the community. I don...

Precision Planter project Blum Fellow Stephanie Lew Botswana Summer 2017 It’s been a crazy change going from life in California to life in Botswana. I had a moment this morning where I was really missing home. I figured that I was missing the people I spent my time with and the predictability of my daily routine, but when I thought about what I was feeling even more, I realized that above all, I missed being comfortable. I miss comfort of being surrounded by my closest friends and family. I miss the comfort of showering. I miss knowing the social norms. I miss knowing how to speak the native language. I miss knowing what to expect. I then came to realize the issue with this. I’ve always believed that growth happened when you push yourself out of your comfort zone. This is actually a belief of mine that I picked up from my first, and only international trip before this one, to Nicaragua. I’ve always preached to myself to strive to seek new, different experiences, and her...

Blog Post 3 Week 4 7/15-7/20 By the start of our last week we had finished the construction of the first spring catchment and were putting the final touches on the third catchment. When we conducted the new flow rate being delivered to the community we found that it was twice as much as compared to last year, a huge success! We were using the extra labor we had available to replace old pipeline and connect the new spring catchments to the storage tank. Besides spending our time completing construction related tasks we began completing important assessment related activities. An essential part of the trip was to assess the feasibility of future projects that were in need in the community. Through the first three weeks which included some preliminary data collection we deduced that there were three viable future projects. These included, a new water storage tank, a new pipeline connecting the communities current storage tank to the beginning of the distribution line, and a new...

The second and third week of the trip flew by as our days were jam packed with work. We would get up everyday at 6 to make breakfast at 6:30 so that we could arrive on-site at 8 am. We would have a meeting with the contractor and labor to go over goals for the day and work on site until 5 pm (we would do half days on Saturdays and generally take Sundays off). We would eat dinner right after until 6:30 pm. After that would usually spend an hour or two typing up our field daily reports as well as make any important revisions to our plans that happened frequently due to site conditions. We would usually be completely done with work around 8 or 9 pm. A couple of nights we had to work later due to the necessity of making further design changes. The second and third week of the trip flew by as our days were jam packed with work. We would get up everyday at 6 to make breakfast at 6:30 so that we could arrive on-site at 8 am. We would have a meeting with the contractor and labor to go o...