To be constantly lost

Liebes Österreich,
(apparently this country isn't feminine and thus needs an 's')

Just got home from some errands (book craving) and had the magic realisation that I haven't used Google maps at all this week. Admittedly, I've spent most of the time at home since I've had a sore throat, and it's only been 4½ days, but it felt like a small victory anyway. To be constantly lost, maybe that's one way to describe how it feels to move to a new city (country). In translation, in direction, in life. And the beauty lies in the perspective that you can't find something that's not lost.

When I sat down I was going to write about last weekend, which I've been postponing. I went to Warsaw, to attend ELLS student conference (European League of Life Sciences) and present my bachelor thesis. Now, the main reason to go was not really the conference, it was to meet up with my peers from last year in Copenhagen, because some of them went on to do their second year at other universities. After a lot of struggle for some of them (missing a flight, then flying to the wrong city and renting a car to get to Warsaw), we had a great time together!

The conference exceeded my expectations - I listened to an abundance of interesting presentations, and I was very satisfied with my own presentation as well. There was also an abundance of vodka and some Polish night life to lift our spirits after a lot of nitrogen and sludge and dying animals ;) As I have been in Warsaw before (with my beloved grandma a year ago to celebrate her 75th birthday) I had already seen the most sights, otherwise the time would not have been sufficient. But I got my dumplings and vodka all right!

Unfortunately the weekend had a very annoying end for me, as the Austrian railway company had written the wrong departure time on my ticket so I missed my train. I had to wait 8 hours for the next train, which was the night train... Which was very stressful, but I ended up re-visiting the national art museum (kinda boring art to be honest but at least good wifi) and then got on the same train as my friend Nathalie, and we even made some new friends that night! But as I got home at 7am instead of 9pm, I was way too tired to attend any of my morning classes (they were taught at the same time...) and came down with a sore throat, which has prevented me from running! Will catch up on that next week hopefully, but I've decided to be extremely careful so I would be fine this weekend, as I get a visit that I've been longing for...

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!

How to write an essay in CBBA

“It was much pleasanter at home," thought poor Alice, "when one wasn't always growing larger and smaller, and being ordered about by mice and rabbits. I almost wish I hadn't gone down the rabbit-hole...and yet...and yet...” 

It's pretty hard to get efficient here. Things take so much more time than you expect them to! It would be easy to complain about this, but hey, this is what makes you realise how privileged we are back home. 

We were promised an office space with wifi, which we thought would be a great place to write. Well, it wasn't. Wifi does not work, people are running in and out, the street outside is heavily trafficked, and the table is way too high for the chairs. Then our room has only one electric outlet, and if we sit for too long on our bed, our bums starts to hurt because it is so hard. We do have one chair, but no table. This is not meant to whine, just describe our reality and the reasons why writing a thesis in Sweden is much more convenient. So what do we do? Well, we have found some places that have wifi. This is a Mexican restaurant: 

And this is Tess, as a great coffee place where we hang out with the other foreigners who like western style places:

Back at our place, I built a table in the courtyard to be able to sit outside to write and read. But I'm afraid it will fall over if I make it any higher, so when I write, I have to bend over until literally have my chest against my thighs. But then I also like having my face pretty close to the notebook when I write.

On the other hand... we have around 25 degrees all the time, which is the perfect temperature even for my picky body. We are surrounded by the most helpful people I could ever imagine (more on that another day). I get to speak my favourite language all the day. We learn new things all the time. Being here is such a great process of self-development  getting to know different sides of myself, getting a lot of new ideas and having to deal with myself. We are honestly not that distracted by our surroundings, since we don't have that many friends here, boyfriend is far, not much going on in this city anyway... We are living our essay and I honestly do believe we will finish it on time, even if many other students who get this scholarship do the writing after they get home. And we are so rich here that we can afford paying someone else to transcribe our interviews, which saves incredible amounts of time and work!

In total, doing a field study is inconvenient, but it rocks. Actually, my life in general is generally not that convenient, but it rocks.

Hard work hopefully pays off...

“My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.” 

We are two hard working women indeed!

Last week were as I’ve already written ups and downs, but when we reached the weekend, we had managed to conduct seven interviews in five days. And remember, we cannot just walk up to any random dude on the street – these are all representatives of an organisation or institution, which requires a bit more formality.

Our plan has been to do the last interviews this week, adding up to 12-15 in total. As the transcription is a VERY time-consuming process (I listen, translate to English and then Tess types it) we are gonna try to hire some linguistic students at the local university to help us with that. It shouldn’t be too expensive considering how much time we would actually save. Next week we intend to finish the work in CBBA, to be able to leave next weekend.

We are getting a bit tired of this city… the climate is lovely indeed, but it is very polluted (one of the most contaminated cities in South America according to a professor we interviewed) and noisy. The mountain range is beautiful, but too far away! So, from here we are heading to Rurrenabaque, which is in the Amazonas region where Tess is gonna do a consultant job for U&We and then we are hoping to do some Eco-tourism in Parque Madidi! 

Plaza during demonstrations

View from our rooftop room

Downs and Ups

“How puzzling all these changes are! I'm never sure what I'm going to be, from one minute to another.” 

I am obviously in the rollercoaster of the thesis – yesterday I felt like a complete idiot! Who do I think I am, coming from fancy Sweden and assuming that in two months I will have a better understanding than the locals about the extremely complex situation of the water management in Cochabamba?

Days like those I am incredibly happy to be with my partner in crime Tess – what would I do without her?! When I’m sobbing, she comforts me and rationally explains why we are not idiots, that our research purpose has a different approach which although it will not change the world, will result in a presentable thesis. Then she tells me I can have an ice cream, and everything feels manageable again.

We decided to broaden our perspective a little and include more stakeholders, and today we have conducted another two interviews. It is a little bit tricky since we cannot just go out in the street and ask anyone, but need representatives from selected stakeholders. But so far we have done five interviews, and we have possibly five more this week. All in all we might possibly end up with 15 interviews, which would be a huge amount of data. But then we are free to choose what will be interesting to us, which is way better than struggling with too little information.

On the personal level, we are still in awe of this country. We see so many beautiful things every day, and the people are incredibly nice and helpful wherever we go. This past Sunday was Día del Peatón, pedestrian day, which meant no motorised vehicles from 9am to 5pm. As I was doing a participatory observation from 8.30am to 10.30, I had to walk 45 min to get back home. What an experience! It felt like two weeks after the apocalypse, or post-oil-peak. So calm and quiet, and the air is less contaminated. I was walking in the biggest roads and saw entire families biking everywhere and people selling juice and ice cream in the middle of the streets. I was filled with joy and prosperity when I got back home. This happens three days per year here in CBBA, and it is surely an eye-opening experience…

Five desks later...

"How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice."You must be," said the Cat, or you wouldn’t have come here.” 

It seems like one day in CBBA is a compromised week. So much happens all the time! During the weekend we became culturally overwhelmed, with an excursion in the city that brought us to la cancha, which according to the rumour is the largest market in South America. From there we visited the last lagoon of Cochabamba – Cocha means lagoon and bamba means flat or flat land in quechua, the indigenous language spoken here. In the night we were taken to a chicha brewery called Chernobyl for a peña, a traditional folklore party. Chicha is a fermented corn drink, which not has that much alcohol but still managed to get my stomach out of order and kept me still for all of Sunday. The Bolivian experience.

This week our thesis has taken some big steps ahead – we have managed to book one interview and two meetings/interviews via email. We went to the local authority with a letter presenting us and asking for an interview, but ended up getting passed around from desk to desk and at table number five, we got an interview straight ahead which was complemented by another chat at the next desk. Feels really great to have started the data collection! The transcription however takes forever, since some subjects speak really fast and we have to translate from Spanish to Swedish or preferably English. So much hard work for a Bachelor thesis! But at the same time, after this job, everything else will feel super easy…

We also met up with Mathilda, another MFS grantee doing her study here in CBBA and we had a really nice time discussing our perspectives on Bolivia. She is writing about racism towards the indigenous population, such an important topic!

This continent is wonderland. There is so much magic here, that I somehow forget about when I’m in Europe. I forget the power that lies in truly believing, and I forget how to really listen to what is around – not only sounds, but also to wishes, desires, connections, heartbeats. Life is worth more here.