Thesis writing is serious business!

“Speak English!' said the Eaglet. 'I don't know the meaning of half those long words, and I don't believe you do either!” 

So, we decided to stay in Rurrenabaque (RBQ) and write the main body of our thesis here. Yesterday we could finally start writing, and it feels fantastic. Our first time here was dedicated to other things – we did an amazing trip to Las Pampas for three days, and two days of field trips for a contract job that Tess is doing for the environmental consultancy U&We. These were fabulous experiences and it was relieving to stop thinking about the thesis for a while – even the best of brains need a rest at some point.

So this week, we have started to revise the interviews. It is a hard job indeed, reading the transcriptions in Spanish, I select the important parts and then I translate them for Tess. The texts are hard to deal with since spoken vs written language is so different, and they can be very confusing… a funny thing is that in Spanish, ‘no’ can sometimes mean ‘yes’, it depends on the intonation, which we of course cannot see in the transcriptions! Cochabamba feels like such a long time ago, and even though we mentally started processing the material already when we did the interviews, there are many things we don’t remember. Especially for Tess, who never fully understood the material when we did the interviews.

When we did our data collection, I got to practice my skills as an interviewer since Tess does not manage the Spanish that well yet. This learning process has become very obvious to me now, as I see the varying quality of the interviews. And although my Spanish is good, it is still my third language and therefore I can be thrown of my feet if the informant is using a confusing rhetoric. And I swear, Spanish-speakers can be so confusing!

Now, we try to write as much as we possibly can. I miss our kitchen table in our old apartment in Malmö very much – RBQ is great in many ways, but writing here is difficult. It is very warm, which makes our mid-day writing sessions very sweaty. We still don’t have a proper table where we live, which makes writing not ergonomic at all, and this is a noisy place (although the hotel we are at now is pretty good in that sense). Still, I would not want to be anywhere else.

To go for a swim in the river whenever we get too hot, walk barefoot, some of the new friends we met here, the hills, the pace of this place… I was lying in the garden a while ago, looking at the sky and the bush with orange/pink flowers next to me. The colours are so vivid! That is something I really miss in Sweden – everything is a bit …duller. It of course has its own charm, but this lively colours, especially the green of the plants in contrast to the sky, it fills me with energy.

Las Pampas ... will tell more about that another time!