rural-urban interface.

This morning, I saw a coyote booking it through downtown Falmouth on my way to work. I felt bad for the poor little guy/girl. We've expanded into their space and have now written them off as a nuisance. What an existence.

One of my favorite Natalie Merchant songs goes like this:

I may know the word
But not say it
I may know the truth
But not face it
I may hear a sound
A whisper sacred and profound
But turn my head
Indifferent

I may know the word
But not say it
I may love the fruit
But not taste it
I may know the way
To comfort and to soothe
A worried face
But fold my hands
Indifferent

(Chorus)

I may know the word
But not say it
This may be the time
But I might waste it
This may be the hour
Something move me
Someone prove me wrong
Before the night comes
With indifference
...

Some of the rest of the lyrics are a little darker. But, for some reason, every time I hear this song I well up with emotion--a strange sensation that has tones of beauty, responsibility, lightness, weight and balance. Hope, and despair. And that reminds me that being indifferent--without strong feeling of joy, of pain, or the openness to being moved--means, ultimately, giving up on what it means to be alive.

About a month ago, I gave a presentation about Mozambique to a group of sixth graders who were visiting the Center. Yesterday, I was delighted to find some letters from these kids in my mailbox. Yes, I know this was probably a graded assignment that served the dual purpose of practicing the correct format for letter writing and a handwriting test. Nonetheless, some are quite lengthy, and many have additional questions. Now, the question will be whether I can make it a priority to send them back (a) letter(s). Here are a few excerpts from these letters:

"Although you taught my class and me many things, I still have a couple of questions. These questions are: did the people of Mozambique have plumbing like sinks, toilets, etc., and do people in Mozambique not live as long as we do because they do not have a modern-day society? These are questions that I would like to be answered, so I hope you can write back. In the meantime, I would like to say thank you for everything."

"Learning about the Mozambique people was important because it taught me that we are all unique in the way we live. We all have different customs, beliefs, clothes, food, and just a different way of life to survive in our environment...
I wouldn't have minded to learn more about the Mozambique people if there had been more time. For example, I would have liked to know: What other kinds of crops and animals do they raise? What kinds of festivities do they celebrate? And also, what are some of their religious beliefs and customs? Thank you, Ms. Bowman for sharing your knowledge and experience with us about the people of Mozambique. Your presentation grabbed my attention."

(Insert warm, fuzzy feeling here)

"Your job is the awesomest! I wish I could have it. It is neat that you get to travel to Mozambique."

"It looked like a difficult job to collect a ton of firewood for your house...it looks pretty tough to have to do all that work."

Yeah, man. It's getting cold here, and it would be an adjustment to be spending my days running around in moccasins collecting firewood. I hear you on that one.

The number one uncomfortable thing about flying.

Today's number one uncomfortable thing related to air travel is: armrests. That's right. The lack of leg room is troublesome, the elimination of free snacks also a bit of an annoyance--and having lost my luggage both times I have flown in the past week certainly got under my skin. The lack of something soft on top of an armrest, however, is a much larger hindrance to sleep than the fact that I am self-conscious and worried about drooling while trying to doze with a ruler-straight back without slumping onto the unsuspecting person next me. Yes, the fact that my hands and forearms fall asleep and leave me without blood flow to my fingers was the clincher.

I have been debating discontinuing my weblog. But, since I have not come to any conclusive decisions about this, I will keep trying to add little updates about what is going on in my life.

In brief, this week I visited the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. It is a fantastic department with a lot of exciting work going on. Being that it is my first program visit of the year, I have nothing to compare it to. But, I was pleased. I also enjoyed visiting with a friend from college, Jeremy Weber, who is working on a Ph.D. in the department, as well as my friend Pilar Jano who completed her Master's degree in the AAEC department at VT.



Later in the week, I spent a great deal of time working through a set of notes on a conference on Advancing Conservation in a Social Context that took place at WHRC the week before, for which I served as the reporteur (that's right, the note taker). I am still working on this. We are also working hard on finishing up the report for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD...here's an interesting article) for the Democratic Republic of the Congo and other things that are related to getting our stuff together for the Bali COP. But, the women (and men) that I work with still find time to have fun, as you can see below---on Thursday night we put on our Fancy Shoes and went out for Martinis in Falmouth.

Me, hiding behind a face that is not mine, and Jer, looking smashing, as: himself.

through someone else's lens.

This morning, I received a cd in the mail of Heidi's pictures. Heidi was in Mozambique with me for two weeks, and captured a couple of interesting moments:

Here is Camilo, pontificating about the challenges and rewards of field work.

Me eating either a) instant baby food or b) instant soup from my metal mug

A full-group shot in Gorongosa...

The photographer man who would not stop talking in our chapa that broke down by the side of the road on the way back to Beira. This is us, stuck by the side of the road.

It's pretty here, in the fall.

I have been back in the U.S. for a few weeks, now--the longest stretch of time I have spent in the land of the "free" since May. And the first time I have truly re-settled somewhere here in several years. I have traded conversations with rural Mozambicans and bright-eyed college students from Beira for a sea of culturally experienced, diverse, and very bright worker bees who are hell-bent on saving the world from the consequences of global climate change. In a multi-million dollar building with a great porch, where I can still escape outside and read forest change and household welfare literature to my heart's content under the eaves until it starts getting too cold here on Cape Cod to do so (just to clarify...that is where I work, not where I live... ;) ).

I love all of my realities of the past year and a half: my house full of melodramatic Brazilian women with the slightly-too-laid-back landlord and the lab in Belo Horizonte full of good-natured programmers and spatial modelers, my self-sufficient, on-the-go self that (sometimes) feels the adrenaline rush at the thought of showing up in a new city or a remote village and feeling so very out of place. The staying put in one place until I've got those people who surround me that I can dial up after a couple of beers at 2am--who don't mind if I drop by their house insanely early without knocking and hang out with their pets--the comfort of having another place (group of people?) that I refer to as "home". The visits to my other homes that have built me up and rejuvenated me--times with my family, Jer, Aurora, Kerry, Rebekah, Callie, Matt, Christa etc. in the past year that have blurred the present and the past, and reminded me of the ways in which the people in my life have shaped my experiences so completely.

It gets confusing though--sometimes I feel like I am simultaneously so sure of who I am and what it is that drives me--what I need, want, and have to give-- and so very uncertain about my ability to do everything that I aspire to, well. Life, love, social change. Being a scientist, a girlfriend, a friend, a sister, a daughter, someone who moves, someone who stays put. Someone who lives in the moment, and someone who sets goals and invests in the things that she values; who integrates all of the things she sees and does in order to do these things more wholly. Takes all of these different realities and lets them shape her into someone stronger. A better academic. A more intuitive person. Someone who listens and absorbs more fully, cries more often, allows herself to be angry occasionally, acknowledges that she has fears, and embraces confusion and insecurity. I want to be this someone...but also someone who lets my hope and my intuition--not my confusion, my insecurity, my fear, or my anger--inspire the way that I live my life.

The novelty of hot showers and drinkable tap water...

...has not yet worn off.

I thought at the very least I could put up some more pictures of my last couple of weeks of field work. The month, in summary, was high-intensity, stressful, rewarding, and fun. I had a total of one sick day, which was the last day in the field...who knows whether this resulted more from sun exposure, sheer exhaustion, or actual digestion issues?

Frank keeps telling me to take some time off, so I am trying to phase-in, and doing the equivalent by making a blog posting while in the office, and I will later go home for a nap and to make it outside. The tents are airing in the yard, and I attempted to remove some of the red Gorongosa mud from their bottoms this morning.

Getting water is women's work. It occupies an enormous amount of household time, especially when a woman may walk up to two hours to a water source and then have to wait in line--

My campsite was right next to the water source at the Dept. of Agriculture compound in Inhaminga. Because the water only runs from 6:15 to 6:45 AM, this means people were congregating around my tent to wait in line, often while I was still asleep!


Cotton is a major cash crop in the districts of Cheringoma and Gorongosa. The economics of it are particularly interesting, because the pesticides and seeds needed to grow it are often sold on pre-harvest credit, which often leads to a sort of positive feedback cycle of indebtedness to the cotton company. We did meet a few people who were doing quite well, however, and below you see the fruits of the most recent harvest at the house of the local secretario.

Kids in Mozambique are often quite scared of me. These kids (below) got closer than most, and were excited to have their picture taken with me.


During our stay in Inhaminga, we got to welcome the national secretary of the FRELIMO party, which was a big deal.

Things like this in Mozambique are greeted with much dancing, singing, and celebration.


On a day off, we took a trip to Monte Gorongosa, and spent a few hours in the rain hiking to a beautiful waterfall.

Of course, I was unable to resist getting in for a dip, though I was already freezing and didn't spend very long in the water. Note the fleece and bikini fashion statement that was necessary after this act. If you look more closely, you can see me turning blue.


Fire in Mozambique is used for agricultural clearing, like most other places. This fire, though, was set by a group of hunters to flush out cane rats, and other edible animals. The guy we interviewed just after walking by this burning area said that he would lose his stand of bananas as a result of this action.

A smart bird or a dumb bird? What happens when someone wants those bottom (supporting) bananas?

This girl was not so sure about the camera thing...but met me with a steady gaze.

When I was a child, we lived in Barcelona for a year. I remember my mother making me peanut butter cracker sandwiches for my mid-morning snack that I would take with me as I left the house. These sandwiches were made with a particular type of sweet cracker—a “Maria” cracker! I loved it that they had my name on them.

How fitting, then, that a comfort food of the past two weeks (in addition to canned sardines, granola bars, and a newly-discovered tasty source of nutrition: instant infant food--) has been these same crackers. In addition to this hodge-podge of accessible staples, we have feasted on yesterday’s baaing goat, a ratazana (rather large rat hunted as bush meat), and I have been served several simple but delicious meals in huts.

These past two weeks, as you may have already suspected, have been spent in the field here in the province of Sofala, Mozambique. I arrived in Beira on the 2^nd of September, and after buying bicycles and picking up the first set of sampling maps, headed to the town of Nhamatanda.

(Franziska and Silvestre marvel that we got the bikes on the truck)

In Nhamatanda, we set up camp at a training center for health professionals. Fortunately, we had a water source available, toilets to use (wash water dumped in afterwards for a flush), and electricity. I learned quickly how to take a bath with my metal cup from a bucket (thereby washing my coffee cup and my body at the same time…and my socks and underwear with the leftover water…), and quickly abandoned any traces of modesty associated with communal bathing.

After training nearly 30 local enumerators in the first two days in addition to the 14 students we had brought with us from the Universidade Pedagogica da Beira, we selected 25 local enumerators to work with us.

(training in action)

(students learn how to use a GPS unit)

A workday in Nhamatanda went something as follows:

Up, sometimes before my alarm, at dawn. If we were lucky, the local cook hired by the students had already made a fire to boil water and run into town to buy bread. This luck meant instant coffee—the days without were brutal for me! Despite being a morning person, I am somewhat caffeine dependent for a smiling face at 5:30 AM.

From our camp, we piled into three vehicles (one of which I wound up driving the first week, much to my surprise--) and drove from the camp to meet the local enumerators at the district administrative offices. There, I dug out the master map and the smaller sample maps, and divided the randomly-selected quadrants among our seven groups, each led by a team leader with a GPS.

(at work, planning the day)

After getting dropped somewhere roughly in the vicinity of their quadrants, each group was then responsible for finding each quadrant using the topo maps, compasses and GPSes and finding the appropriate number of houses to interview. You may think this sounds like a fairly straightforward task; I can assure you that it is no such thing. Finding quadrants and houses within these quadrants often required up to 2 hours of off-roading in a truck, up to 15 km of walking (what I hiked with a group one day), braving the hot sun, tromping through burned areas, old corn fields, riverbeds, and brambles, and getting totally disoriented.

All of this effort—and sometimes no huts to be found. This was a constant frustration. Nonetheless, we rounded our goal of 500 interviews in Nhamatanda on Wednesday the 12^th.. I finished it off with a celebratory cold Heineken, and we moved on to the district of Muanza on the 13^th. Muanza has been a little less hectic…mainly because we are not covering quite as large a geographic area, and because we are slightly more experienced. The biggest problem has been that our sampling strategy dictates that we sample at a density of 5 houses per km in an area that has nowhere near this number. So, we have adapted.

Challenging moments over the past weeks have included testing my off-road driving skills to the utmost (and usually wowing the locals with them…except for one unfortunate encounter with a stump while driving through a field of tall grass….the local enumerator probably wanted to strangle me after I then applied alcohol to his busted lip), groups getting stranded without rides back to camp, trying to talk my way out of a tricky situation with a village chief that had not been advised by the district that we would be arriving, and digging a thorn out of my knuckle with…another thorn…while sitting through an interview. Sunscreen runs in my eyes when I am hiking, but a full day without it here, and I am crisped. Hitching a ride to Beira in a really big truck…this is (comparatively) safe here because every truck has at least five people on it already. Fortunately, I didn’t arrive covered in dust, because they put me—the only woman—in the cab!

Sad moments have been families explaining to you how little they eat, about the diseases they contend with, and how much time and energy they must dedicated daily to finding fresh water. Occasionally I lose my patience with students that are whiners and are unwilling to walk…or with the fruitless hunt for houses in remote, randomly-selected quadrants.

Beautiful moments have been smiles shared with households who genuinely enjoy sharing their realities with us, laughter shared with fellow field buddies when you have just walked for 3 km to find yourself in an uninhabited forest…but attain your GPS points. Evening sunsets while bathing in a reed mat bathhouse under the open sky. Fresh papayas and eating things that I can’t identify.

Frank calls regularly to catch up on our activities and to give his two cents worth, and I appreciate his degree of trust in me and everyone else who is throwing themselves into this project. I know that he wishes he could be here—and there are times I wish I could be sitting in an office living a normal life this month.

Field work is tough. It requires enormous amounts of resources—time, energy, money—and it never transpires neatly, as planned. We don’t always have these resources available, and theoretical models also have their place. The opportunity to give rise to models from rigorous field data, however, I think is pretty cool. Call me a dork.

I am fortunate to have a job in which I am asked to create models as well as to converse with families in rural huts in Africa.

This sort of contrast keeps me grounded in the reality of the work that I do—puts faces with the thousands of data points, and gives context to the results that we dedicate ourselves to interpreting and conveying to the world. Without this, we as researchers are what a member of my master’s committee likes to call “armchair economists”; economists that postulate and run our models without knowing whether our conclusions reflect the complex picture of the world, a country, or a family unit in Mozambique.

Some more visuals...

This guy ran to change his clothes after I asked to have my picture taken with him...and brought his radio for good measure!

This enormous stack of wood was being covered in earth to create a charcoal furnace. Large amounts of deforestation in the Muanza area are occuring due to the market for charcoal, which is used primarily for cooking.

I just had to laugh...this guy is on the cutting edge of early adoption.

They eat a lot of cooked corn meal, here...I partook of some that this woman here was preparing.

Signing off for at least another week an a half…hope this has given you a taste of what I’ve been up to!

Movin'

They've been a busy few weeks. First, a quick stop in Dingman's Ferry, PA for a visit with the Bittinger Clan (and a celebration of both Mom and Antonio's birthdays!) before even unpacking my bags:



Knoxville, TN for a visit with Aurora--tears and laughs inspired by yet another Patty Griffin show together. Unbelievable.

--and a stop on the way back in Roanoke to hug Rebekah Carswell (now a proud mother--next time hopefully I will get to see Paul and Naomi, and take some pictures!).

A move to Falmouth, MA:




And a few days in Lancaster and Landisburg, PA with Jeremy and the rest of the Good family.


Now, I find myself in....a hotel in South Africa. Other lovely moments of the last few weeks include...

Trying hard to make baby Holly smile, and watching my cousins and family members make fools of themselves on a unicycle.

Meandering sunset motorcycle rides in the Dayton countryside with my sweetie...on the way to dinner.

Sweet corn.

Me and Jared (my housemate, not my brother) helping the moving guys move my stuff down the street because the moving truck couldn't get close enough.

Finding new woods to explore on Cape Cod

Dinners and conversations shared with new colleagues

Time with the brothers, the dogs, and the Family. Bonding over South Park, wine, and coffee.

Bubbles, Bocce, time in the woods and by the lake, marvelous movies, fabulous food, and fine company at the Kick Back Shack with the Good family...sleeping late, watching the full moon come up, and eating outside.


What does the next month hold?

Mozambique. Household surveys. Hopefully me gathering the nerve to take more Mozambique pictures.

Probably a lack of blog postings, due to the craziness that will be our field campaign, and a decrease in internet access.

Should be fun...and challenging. Send your hugs, your strength, and your resiliency vibes. I might need them.

Much love.