February!

The semester is in full swing. Travels (unexpected mostly) are coming up. Somewhere between the flurry of classes and assignments, I make it to a class or two of Pilates, and enjoy the slow pain of my body uncurling from its long lapse into laziness. The weekends are a time of pause and books surround me.

This is a recent poem I found:

'My shortest days end,

My lengthening days begin.

What matters more or less sun in the sky,

When all is sun within?'

Christina G Rossetti

Views of Downtown Minneapolis in the distance
from across the bridge

Glimpses from here and there

My favorite picture this week: napping in front of my school.

 

Look carefully. This is the shoe tree. When folks graduate, they throw
 their shoes up here. It creeps me out loads.

The one where I ask a lot of questions!

This is a post full of questions. Serious questions. So everybody who is reading and has something to share, please do answer (here, email, social media, whatever is your preferred mode of communication :))

1. I am looking for resources about Community Forestry Enterprises, Non Timber Forest Products, sustainable harvesting and livelihoods and to talk to folks. If you know people who have worked in this area, especially South East Asia, and can help me connect, that would be great!
2. I am looking for Indo-German collaborations (organizations/initiatives/non-profit/private/government) that work in the area of education (higher education, internationalization of education), community and youth development, gender focused work. Any names spring to mind?
3. Ideas and suggestions on how a one month period in the winter (mid December to January) can be used best - I mean ideas on volunteer work, one-month internships etc. I don't want to be in Minnesota during winter break this year and am not sure I can do a month-long vacation. So it would be nice to be working or being useful in some way. Any ideas?
4. Project ideas: The Humphrey School has sent out a Request for Proposal for capstone projects for Spring 2015: essentially they are seeking proposals from organizations that want students to work on a sort of consulting project for a specific area around development, social or policy areas. Essentially this is a free project for the organization and a chance for students to gain some experience. More details of the project and timelines are at the following link: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/gpa/globalnotes/2014/04/humphrey-school-global-policy.php. Any ideas on interesting organizations and projects I could connect with?

Preparing for our field work next week

Working breakfast during our meeting 
to finalize the survey

Most of this week and today has been spent preparing for our field visits next week. As of now the idea is to meet with officials from three departments that work in the area of forestry and meet with 12 groups in different villages. How much of this will convert into reality will only be known next week. The planning for this trip has been fairly fluid, in terms of dates, people going with us, the groups we are meeting etc etc. We have prepared our questionnaires and surveys and have gone through three rounds of reviews.

Judd Fellowship newsletter

Oh look, the blog got featured in the Judd newsletter :-) (which is one of the fellowships I got for doing the project)! Also, go visit the link and read about what other people, including MDP students in Ecuador, Jamaica and Kenya are working on over the summer!

http://global.umn.edu/funding/judd/newsletters/2014_june.html

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.