I graduated on June 4th. I did not get any time to enjoy the feeling of having a master’s of sustainability science, though. My contract as a research assistant started the same day I graduated, and three days later, I left Sweden for project meeting/workshop/study site scoping trip to Burkina Faso and Ghana.
Charles de Gaulle airport was a maze. To be honest, now afterwards, I’m not sure going on this trip so soon after graduating was optimal. I was so exhausted after having turned in the thesis, doing all the celebrating with classmates and other friends, and then presenting. I felt like I hadn’t slept properly for weeks. Which I probably hadn’t. And then going on a long trip, with the stress of flying, and meeting all the new people (no one else from the SRC team came with me, so I was all alone among strangers), and especially the new setting. Discussing a project together with professional researchers. It was daunting, and terrifying, and I am certain I did not make a good first impression on these people. I was confused, the things I said only made half-sense, I hadn’t done all the suggested background reading. It didn’t help that none of the others were really sure about what this huge, still not properly crystalized project was all about either, or what we were supposed to do here.
(I will tell you more about the project in a later post, and how it’s structured. For now, it’s enough for you to know that the project is focused around agricultural innovations in the Volta basin, especially the construction and use of micro-dams, and the project team consists of researchers from many different backgrounds and disciplines, from different universities and research organizations, and they are all grouped together in different teams that are going to study this thing about the dams from different perspectives. That means that there are a number of different quite separate puzzle pieces that need to be fitted together to create a meaningful whole. It will be hard, but if we pull it off, we’ll probably come up with some really cool results.)
So, to summarize, it was just a couple of really confusing first days spent in a meeting room at the CIRAD office in Ouagadougou, with the representatives from the different teams trying to fit their respective pieces together.
But the days in Ouagadougou were not only spent in a meeting room. I also went to the maze-like, kafkaesque statistics office in Ouaga 2000 (pictured above) in search of data for our part of the project. What we’ll be doing is to use already existing biophysical and socioeconomic data for the entire Volta basin, and try to group them together somehow, in order to identify different social-ecological systems – basically, places where the social and ecological conditions are similar. (I’ll write more about this later too.) This means that our project depends on the existence of the right kind of data, and us getting access to it. In countries like Burkina Faso and Ghana, that can be very complicated.
But Kate and I were, as it turns out, incredibly lucky. (Kate is a researcher from Minnesota who will be working on the same part of the project as me. She’s great.) We met a man, and he took us to his office, and started copying statistical reports onto my USB stick. Just like that. They were all in pdf format, which isn’t ideal since it’ll have to be digitized somehow into a format that statistical programs can understand, but at least we got it. Later, when we talked to other people who had tried to get access to data too, it became clear that we just happened to be at the right place at the right time and catch the right guy. Normally, getting data from the Burkinabe statistics office can take weeks of sending request letters and getting permissions. Now, I have something to work with during the summer.
In Ghana, we did not go searching for any data. All the official offices are in Accra, and we didn’t make it that far south. But we did visit the office of the Water Resource Commission, housed in this rain-painted building.
It was an intense couple of days, my first as a research assistant, in Burkina Faso and later Ghana, at meetings and data search visits. Right now, things aren’t fully making sense yet, but I think we’ll get there. It’s a great group of people, the larger project team, and once I got over my insecurities of being the least prepared and least experienced of the participants, I really enjoyed myself. I think this job will be really exciting.
Katja Malmborg 