Adventures in research, motherhood and travel
It’s been awhile since I posted, but I have been in the thick of conducting my interviews and site surveys. I just finished this past week, having conducted 70 interviews and 46 site visits since mid-April! It’s been a whirlwind of long days journeying all over the countryside by car, foot and horseback and sharing cafes and agua dulces (a traditional warm sugar tea, for lack of a better description) with some extremely generous campesinos.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been organizing and holding focus groups in different communities in the upper part of the Bellbird Corridor. These were actually the first focus groups I had ever led. While I’m sure I made a few mistakes along the way, they definitely helped me move my research forward and were a good learning experience!
The process of organizing the focus groups in rural Costa Rica gave me a whole new appreciation for the ease by which we are able to organize meetings by email back home. Many people in this area don’t use email, so after getting lists of recommended participants from local collaborators, I had to either call them or go find them at their places of business. I was a little intimated about this at first, but it ended up being a good opportunity to make connections with lots of different people in the community (and practice my Spanish đŸ™‚ )
Last week we traveled to QuerĂ©taro, Mexico so I could participate in the Mid-Year Conference for the Interamerican Foundation’s (IAF) PhD fellowship program. There are 15 other students in the fellowship program at various stages in their grassroots development related research projects throughout Latin America. It was really inspiring to hear about everyone’s work. Many of the students are working in challenging environments and topical areas than- from Central American migration in Mexico to the Colombian peace process to the implementation of reparations for political violence in Peru, it was great to exchange ideas with this group of people from diverse disciplinary and cultural backgrounds.
I have been in Costa Rica for just over a month now getting started with fieldwork for my PhD. For those of you that are interested in my research (and not just cute pictures of my baby in Costa Rica!), let me provide a brief introduction. My work is focused on comparing the impacts of grassroots reforestation efforts with the national Payment for Ecosystem Services (Pago por Servicios Ambientales, or PSA in Spanish) program. As the name would suggest, Payment for Ecosystem Services programs provide payments to incentivize land use practices that will improve ecosystem services like water filtration, flood control and carbon sequestration. While grassroots reforestation programs don’t offer financial incentives, they provide free trees and/or fencing to facilitate reforestation and are very popular here as a way to protect water supplies and create windbreaks.
