Day One of DR: The Pilot Study

We’ve officially finished the first part of the program and are now headed full tilt into Directed Research! I mentioned this in my first post, but the School for Field studies has Five Year Plans at each of their sites. The Five Year Plan is a large, on going research project that, well, lasts for five years! Each DR project is a small component of the Five Year Plan. The overarching question for the East Africa Five Year plan is:

            How can changes in land use and resource availability in the Maasai steppe of Kenya       and Tanzania be managed in such a way as to foster the well-being of local communities whilst safeguarding and promoting biodiversity conservation?

My DR is studying the contribution of beekeeping to household income and poverty alleviation in two villages, Ayalaliyo and Kambi ya Faru. There are six other students studying other various aspects of beekeeping as well. We all work as a team interview local people and then we will write separate papers.

            Today was our “Pilot Study” where we tested out the questionnaires and data sheets that we created. Ours was a little stressful because we only started making the questionnaires this morning, so it felt like very little time to put together a nice, cohesive group of questions. It all ended up OK though, since the pilot study is all about seeing how the questionnaires worked and giving us opportunities to change the questionnaires.

            In the early afternoon, we headed out to Ayalaliyo, which is about an hour and a half away from Rhotia. I had heard from several people that the Enderbash region, where Ayalaliyo and Kambia ya Faru were located, was stunningly beautiful with farmland and rolling hills. My expectations, however, were completely blown away. These villages are way up in the Karatu highlands, and the valleys, forests, rich farmland, and distant vista views made it the most beautiful place I’ve visited in Tanzania. Even the red soil was beautiful to look at—it was flecked with gold mica and vaguely glittered in the light. It sounds like I’m making that up, but it’s really true!

            We had three guides and were split up into three groups. We walked around the hilly countryside, looking for households to interview. When we do interviews, we basically just walk into someone’s yard and call Hodi, which doesn’t really have a translation, but it’s kind of announcing that you’re there and asking to come in. After our guide/translator explains why we’re there, people usually invite us into their houses and under a shady tree. Most people are quite open and friendly. The interviews are translated from English to Swahili or the local language. A lot of people weren’t home, but we did meet one woman (who was the wife of one of the askari- guards- here at camp) who kept bees. It was really hard to get some of the questions across (especially mine about specific costs and then the ones trying to get at non-use values were pretty much impossible), but hopefully we will be able to work out the kinks. We only had to do two interviews per group, but that was still pretty exhausting.

            DR is going to be something quite new for all of us. We’re all split up into different groups and we spend the whole day outside of camp. But what we’re doing is very exciting, and at the end, we get to present it all to the community. Apparently, presentation day is a day of festivities, with presentations and then lunch for the whole community.

            I was quite pleased to find out that a lot of these projects were created after officials from different organizations asked our professors to look into certain issues. For example, one group is researching wild dogs in Tarangire and the surrounding area because officials from Tarangire National Park asked our wildlife management professor to look into the wild dogs there. My group is doing beekeeping because officials from Karatu asked our policy professor to investigate beekeeping and its benefits in a region where that was not well studied.

            So now we have nine more days of intense fieldwork and then we’ll be less than a month away from our departure date. :( It is coming up way too fast!!

Oh, and highlight of the day:

Mwamhanga, our policy professor, giving us a lecture that went from following your passions instead of expecting that a degree was going to make you happy to how to get over your boyfriend or girlfriend cheating on you. It was great.