Day 4 (also the day where we go sightseeing)

Group photo!

This is, if you haven't already figured out, a relatively light week for us. Our experience can vary between 8 - 10 weeks and we are choosing to spend 10 weeks here and thus I think we are using this week mostly the way we intended to. Rather I should say I think this is a justified and sensible use of our time. I have hit the ground running for different projects in different cities (in India) and I have known and been in favor of the motivation for that. That being said, it has been a really long time since I had the chance to slowly immerse myself into a new project. I think being in a new country, where I don't speak the language at all, where our work has relevance but not the pressing immediacy of say a disaster relief project (which I have worked on), I am grateful for the opportunity to explore the city, meet with different people and treat this like a marathon instead of a sprint.

Where I mime for a towel and forget what wearing shoes feels like

Miming is our primary method of communication here. My favorite one was enacting a towel in the aisle of a supermarket to a confused and possibly slightly embarrassed salesgirl. When the face towel gestures didn't do it, I pretended to take a bath and rub myself vigorously. She then figured it out and led me to the stack of towels. Which was great except the entire team was standing there and I am pretty sure she thought I was the biggest idiot ever.

***

It feels like my feet have forgotten how to wear shoes. I blame being encased in lined boots for months in the Minnesota winter. I have three pair of shoes and have almost gone through one whole roll of medical tape. At least thirty Band-Aids. I switched from shoes to slippers today and got blisters on my feet, because why not.

***

I have been told (not asked but told) at least six times between the time I left Minneapolis and got here that I am Indian. I have always known that I am Indian but I have not been reminded about it in this way. This  reminds me what a quintessentially Indian face I have. 

Work music playlist aka rediscovering music from my college days

:D

Day 3 @ Work

The wedding dress shop where we
 reached accidentally in the morning

We are spending this week mostly meeting with people at various non-profits in Hue. We walked over to Dean's hotel in the morning, spent a little time chatting with him about different approaches to forest conservation and community livelihoods, till Mr. Chuong from CORENARM came, and headed to the office for Hue Union for Science and Technology Associations (HUSTA). There was some mix-up with the directions and the taxi driver drove us straight into the courtyard of a fancy wedding dress shop. We made it to our meeting on time and met some very senior people, including the Chairman. They were very gracious and explained about the work they are doing, which has involved supporting CORENARM and agriculture, but also goes beyond it. I am grateful to CORENARM for doing this for us, this is making our experience so much richer. There seems to be a significant development sector/organization presence in Hue and it is nice to learn about it. We were also told about Hue has a large number of universities and doctoral students. Many of the residents of Hue have highlighted how they enjoy the pace and quality of life here more compared to say a bigger and busier city such as Ho Chi Minh.

Nina's Cafe

Dinner today was at Nina's cafe, which I would strongly recommend (here's their website http://ninascafe.jimdo.com). I had fried eggplant and even though it was green and I am used to purple it was really nice. For those of you thinking if we are working at all (friends and family :)), this is our orientation week and is meant to be lighter and get us acclimatized and settled in. We have been making slow but steady progress on pinning down our project.

Tintin poster at Nina's cafe
(followed a brief discussion about the racism in the books!)

Day 2 @ Work

A very bad picture
 of our office space (sorry!)

We started the day earlier today to meet with our adviser and discuss our options. We are still fuzzy on the exact details but it seems like we are move in the broad direction of Community Based Forestry Management (CBFM) and Enterprises (CBFE), with a possible focus on rattan. As someone with no experience with forest and land issues, I have known right from the beginning that I have a lot of learning to do. Before I can delve into the specifics of CBFM in Thua Thien-Hue, which is where we will work, I need to understand how it works in general and then in Vietnam. I realized that I am using a funnel approach to learning and as I learn about the environmental aspects, I am also trying to understand how the political and social structure plays out at the macro, meso and micro levels (an approach I learned from one of my professors in Fall 2013).

Day 1 @ Work

Our day started with running to get some delicious cold filter coffee, miming (this was all Meagan) and successfully getting either butter or condensed milk with bread, meeting at the hotel lobby and heading out to work. We met with our faculty adviser Dean Current, who just got in this morning. We are working with Consultative and Research Center on Natural Resource Management (CORENARM) and Dung Ngo, who is one of the Founders, has been our main contact. He introduced us to other staff in the organization and gave us an introduction of the three main tracks they work on: natural resource management, sustainable forestry, and disaster management and climate change. He was telling how a group of graduate students got together and had the idea and passion to found CORENARM.

Exploring Hue!

Lunch time

Megan, our fourth teammate arrived today and with that our team is complete. We spent most of the day exploring. We started by looking for a vegetarian (chay) restaurant during siesta time for lunch and ordering from whatever was available. I had friend noodles with lots of vegetables on top and it was nice. I have no clue what the text on the poster on the side means but I want to know (the 'cholesterol' made me curious). It was a small, family-run place (at least that is what it seemed like. Keep in mind my vocabulary of the local language is still at one word. Or perhaps two.)

Sunday in Hue

So we are discovering an interesting thing about the places around our hotel. Most of them are drinking places. So only beer + alcohol. Or like all the cafes we went to in the morning. Only coffee + tea + other drinks. We finally went in one and sat and asked for coffee. Then for bread. They didn't really have bread but they got us some. They were really nice baguettes with sweet butter in them from a place called Ly Baguette. The coffee was delicious! Super strong and sweet, just the way I like it! It seems like we aren't quite getting to switch to a room with a desk and more cupboard space today, which is a little sad but not the end of the world. One more week of living out of a suitcase! 

Books? Lists? Currently out of things to do?

Since I can't sleep, I have to do something. What could be more fun than making lists? Of late, I have been meaning to read but haven't managed to as much. I was just thinking about all the fantastic books I had read in the last year. In no particular order, here's a list in pictures:

So good, I remember not being able
to put it down and crying. I remember being on a flight to Minneapolis last year
and the lady next to me remarking on how good the book was.

Getting to Hue

Our trip to Hue was full of adventures. Adventures that began even before our flight took off. We had booked VietJet flights since it is comparatively inexpensive. I definitely had a ton of luggage and was worried about excess baggage but the website told us 32 kgs! Yay because the limit was 23 kgs when I flew from the States and boy did that get me into trouble even with planning. We went to the VietJet counter outside at the terminal to figure out baggage limits and turns it out it was 25 kgs per person and 7 kgs for hand baggage (which they weigh - this is the first time I saw that happening. I think I flew in almost 15 kgs from Minneapolis (at no point could I lift the suitcase I had on person, even with all my muscles and strength). The lady at the counter spoke little English and we, well, we speak no Vietnamese. She kept asking us how much our luggage weighs and we kept saying we need weighing scales and this went on for a while.

Ho Chi Minh: First Impressions

Exercise bikes at a park we walked through.
What a great idea!

Today was spent exploring Ho Chi Minh/Saigon. Our hotel (Meagan and I) is in District 1 and I'd like to think we had an active, yet lazy morning with lots of iced tea and coffee and cold water and a walk around Ben Thanh market that did not end in a single shopping bag. We met and made friends both for lunch and dinner and it was a nice way to be introduced to the city. I haven't been able to enjoy any of the food because of the heat but I will get to it.

Idol at Giac Lam pagoda

In Ho Chi Minh

It is 2.30 at night and I can't fall asleep. I landed in Ho Chi Minh after a journey that at 36 hours may be the longest time I have been in transit (in air). As always, it was very interesting. The flight from Chicago to Tokyo both had no in flight entertainment ( that baffled me a little) and was delayed. I made it to the Tokyo flight with perhaps 10 minutes to spare. I was prepared for the worst but am glad it didn't happen. I definitely ran at the airport and with that gave up on my vision of a suave worldly traveler. Instead I am the person whose suitcase falls, things fall out of my bag(s) and in all my flights I needed help to lift my carry on. I don't want to know how much it weighed seriously.

I stepped out of the flight and thought this air smells familiar even if I have never been here before. Everything went off smoothly and I was out in ten minutes. Meagan came to get me at the airport and it was great to see a familiar face among the sea of people and we haggled around till we found the least exorbitant taxi (you can't get the cheapest ones at the airport anymore). I just have one day here before we fly out to Hue and am looking forward to exploring the city. As the flight landed I could see a bustling city, full of lights and shop signs flashing in red, blue and green. We haven't fully planned the day yet but I hope to do as much as I can.

Checked in and waiting to leave

I may have officially set my own record for one of my worst check-ins. Woke up seven minutes before the Super Shuttle arrived. Overweight baggage. My usual repacking strategies did not work and I had to throw away stuff. All my liquids were fine but I forgot to empty my water bottle! The international leg of this journey hasn't even started :). Plus the airport is really warm and my usual tactic of wearing multiple layers to stay warm and reduce baggage weight seems to be currently backfiring. But yay!

Almost gone

I leave tomorrow morning. I have a super shuttle coming at the unearthly hour of 5:30 am. Maybe my first lesson is to not book international flights before 2 pm because that may be the only way I can get good sleep the night before :). I am all packed and I think I have everything I need. Sadly the jar of Nutella has to be left behind. I am also happy to being sent away with hugs and gifts and a sunny Minneapolis day.

In no particular order I am looking forward to:
1. Ordering coffee at the Narita airport because my Japanese friend said to order something, anything to experience the customer service
2. Arriving in humid, hot Ho Chi Minh and exploring it for one whole day
3. Visiting the office of the NGO where we will be working
4. Figuring out if biking will be possible in Hue
5. The field work
6. Figuring out how to document what we are doing well
7. Using my free time to explore both Hue and other places.

Yay for travel! Also yay for leaving Minneapolis for the first time in the nine months since I arrived here (except for a brief trip to Brainerd right at the beginning).

Poster

This is a poster from the Global Spotlight Grants awards ceremony about our project:

Decoding Payment for Ecosystem Services

The project we are going to work involves understanding implementation of a Payment for Ecosystem/Environmental Services (PES) model in the Thua-Thien province and Community Forestry Management. To be honest, PES is not a topic on which I had much, or rather any, knowledge when we started out.

I have spent the last few months trying to understand PES in general and PES in Vietnam. To be fair this is a topic which has a ton of resources out there. There is no dearth of articles and books to read, videos to watch and more. As a team, we also managed to focus on PES for several projects for different classes and this has been helpful because it allowed us to engage with an area where we will be working and make it count for a grade :). We focused on PES in Minnesota for an Agriculture class - the idea is to be able to adopt a compare and contrast model when we return. This also gave us a chance to interview several people including researchers at the U of M, policymakers, sellers, staff from environmentally-focused non-profits and more. We developed an outline for an e-study module for another class and that was an interesting exercise as well. While  I fully expect and am prepared for our project to change once we hit the ground, I think this work will not go waste, if only because my awareness of environmental topics is very limited.

So for anyone who is curious, PES is a model which values the services provided by different ecosystems to human beings. These can include watershed management, biodiversity, aesthetic beauty, carbon sequestration and many more. In this model, buyers/users and sellers of services are identified and a framework is set up to channel money from the buyers to the sellers. While a lot of the definitions I have come across in literature defines these as ‘voluntary transactions’, there are several mandatory models as well - for example in Vietnam it is the government that has enforced the PES model. Another thing I find interesting as a former Economics student is that this is within a market-based framework - the idea that one can value the services provided by the environment.  Valuing carbon sequestration is something that a United Nations program - Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) also focuses on and based on what I have read so far, it seems that at least in Vietnam, the long-term goal is for PES and REDD+ to converge. 

I plan to use this blog to share both what I learn from the literature and get to observe in the field in the hopes that a. it will serve as a record for me to go back to in the future and b. that it may be of interest to some of you out there!

3, 2, 1..

I am three days away from leaving and it has been an intense week. The last of the papers and projects have been submitted and the semester is finally over! I am not quite packed yet but I will get there (because I have faith in my packing list, I do). I do feel sad that just as it is turning sunny in Minneapolis, I am leaving, but oh well.

I wish I had a nice paperback to read along the way. I will be carrying my Kindle and plan to download ebooks (especially books by Scott Fitzgerald which I had been reading before the semester got a little crazy). I also don't have a Lonely Planet Vietnam - perhaps I should get one. I do have a few magazines, including ones in Spanish that friends have lent me (the Spanish ones for me to improve my very poor Spanish beyond quiero hablar Espanol :)). 

I will have two days in Ho Chi Minh city and I am excited about that. I also feel lucky to have met or spoken with people (many students on campus) who are from Vietnam or have lived there for a while and have given us lots of tips. 

From what I have been told about Hue, where we are going, was the old capital of the kingdom, it is famous for its food and it is a popular tourist destination. I think where we are staying is in the old kingdom/palace area and I am looking forward to exploring. I am also getting more and more excited about the work we are going to do: this is going to be a new experience for me!

On that note, I am going to head out to enjoy my last days in Minneapolis for the summer!

Ceremonies and lunches and photos

I have been lucky to have received two very prestigious grants for my work this summer. Both these pictures are from ceremonies/networking events organized for recipients. I am very excited about coming back and learning about the work everyone does over the summer (well at least for those whose projects are planned over the next few months):

2014 Judd Fellowship Cohort

With team Vietnam at the Global Spotlight Grants ceremony

Start!

I leave for Vietnam in less than a week; I will be there for two and a half months. I really should start packing. I have no local currency but I have an emergency jar of Nutella. This is going to be a hell of an experience and I can feel the excitement building!