It’s been a little while since we updated the blog. Here’s a
little about what we’ve been up to.
We visited the second community that Asher will work in for
his dissertation – Campo Bello. Campo Bello is a little more than an hour away
by taxi, so it’s pretty easy to get to during the dry season (right now).
During the rainy season, the road isn’t passable, so we’ll get there by canoe.
It’s a short canoe trip – about 2 hours there (downstream) and four hours back
(upstream) to San Borja.
Asher worked in Campo Bello for a few weeks last summer, so
most of the community already knows him. There are about 55 households there,
and we visited several of them during our one-day visit, giving out photos from
last year. We also looked at a couple potential houses to rent, International House Hunters-Maniqui style. The community seems excited to have us there this year.
In other news, our one-year residency visas were finally
ready for us to pick up in Trinidad, so we went there to pick them up and
celebrate our three year anniversary! For our anniversary, we went to La
Estancia, a really nice Argentinian steak restaurant. We ordered the pacumutu –
an amazing piece of steak to share. We had enough for leftovers the next day!
Our marriage has been fairly easy; we can’t say the same
about our visas. We’re so happy to have them.
Despite the difficulties, we have
had several people help us significantly along the way, including our old
school Trinidad attorney. When we asked for an official request for the visa, he
enthusiastically grabbed his small law book, waved it in the air and said “you
don’t have to go to La Paz to apply for the visa, you can do it here in
Trinidad, IT’S THE LAW!” Even though that wasn’t what we were asking and we
already knew that. Check out the tiger pelts in the background that his office
was adorned with:
As the final step in the bureaucratic adventure we’ve been having,
we applied for our Carnets – Bolivian ID cards. They require you to apply
online, upload a picture, then print it out, and take it to the office. It’s as
if Bolivia took the real life bureaucratic process and put it into an online
virtual experience, complete with terribly slow internet (45 minutes to
download a one-page pdf – 2.3MB – that ended up crashing before it finished).
We’ll pick them up (fingers crossed) in Trinidad in mid-October.
Also in Trinidad, Asher found the only lab that can do water
quality analysis in the Beni – the environmental health department in SEDES
Beni. The head doctor at the lab showed us around enthusiastically, introduced
us to the director of the department, who extended us full support of his
facilities, and provided equipment to use to transport the samples from the
field to Trinidad. This is a huge step and will be a great partnership.
Kelly has been hard at work on her upcoming conference
papers as well as working on a grant application. Asher has been working on his
interview questions, getting them just right, and preparing for the first wave
of data collection.
Now that Asher has selected two communities to work in – one
close to San Borja (Campo Bello) and one much further away (Anachere) – the
real fieldwork begins. But first, we’re spending this week on logistics –
working out a contract with the translator and buying food and other supplies.
We plan to head to Campo Bello in the coming days to stay for almost a month to
conduct interviews and participant observation. We are looking forward to our
first extended stay in the field this trip.
