Update from N'Zerekore

I’m back in N’Zerekore (N’Zerekore is the second largest city in Guinea, just for reference) after an 8 day stint out in the field (rural villages surrounding Mt. Nimba). I spent my time in the field implementing a socioeconomic survey in two communities on the periphery of the Mt. Nimba Forest Reserve: T’huo and Doromou. On Tuesday I’ll be heading back into the field, this time into Cote d’Ivoire. I’ve hired a field crew of four (three assistants, one translator) to work with me, and they’ve been working out quite well despite the fact that the three assistants do not speak English, only local languages and French.

Speaking of French, my French is nowhere near where I’d like it to be, but I feel I have reached a new plateau. I still sound like a sputtering idiot, but (hopefully) I no longer sound like a prehistoric Neanderthal. This morning I was able to eloquently express, “Before we depart, I would like to go to the latrine.” Two weeks ago, I would have communicated this idea by grunting out something like, “Me urinate. After me go N’Zerekore.” The nice part about learning French in West Africa is that French is everybody’s second language, so nobody judges you when you inevitably sound like an idiot.

All in all we talked to 50 people in both villages. Unfortunately some kind of a bug took me down physically, and (to be honest) mentally, for a couple of days. Luckily, I’m back up and running again, and I have recovered my positive attitude. In Guinea, little bouts of dysentery are just inevitable, especially in the villages when so much is outside of your control (sanitation wise). Physically working here has been very demanding. Mentally, it’s also been demanding. The emotional highs are very high, but the lows are very discouraging, and the logistics of working here can be overwhelming. For example… we carry in our own food. In case you are curious, for the last week, we carried in 25 kilos of rice, 5 liters of oil, a sack of vegetables (eggplant, okra, onions, and hot peppers), potato leaves, 2 kilos of beans, dried fish, and three live chickens. We then arranged for somebody in the village to cook for us. This food fed my team of 5, plus any additional helpers that joined us from each village, for 8 days. The cooking was fine. Simple. Rice with stew, and a little bit of meat.

Part of what makes working here difficult is that it can be emotionally exhausting to see so much suffering. People are currently entering what is known as the season of suffering (the sufferance time). Subsistence farmers are just starting to plant (the rains are beginning), and their food stores are depleting. By August what little food remains will pretty much be finished. There is not a lot of food available to buy. When asked what they do when food runs out, or when crops fail, most people simply say, “we suffer.” Meaning, they don’t eat. Perhaps they can harvest some wild bush yams, or sell firewood or forest products for money, but generally people are just hungry. This makes them particularly vulnerable to exploitation, which is difficult to learn about. In Doromou I heard about an organization called Rural Credit that came in at end of the hungry season, when people were starving. They offered loans, and just about everybody took one. For a 180,000 Guinea Franc loan (30 dollars?), people were required to pay back 280,000 guinea francs. If they missed their first payment, they were charged an additional 20,000 francs, and then given 1 week to make the payment. After 1 week, If they still didn’t pay, they were taken to jail. Just about everybody in Doromou who took a loan was jailed. (Keep in mind, most people in Doromou have about a third grade education, and people weren’t totally aware of what they were getting into- they were simply hungry, and somebody offered them money, so they took it to feed their families.) The gentleman who was telling me about Rural Credit is one of the more educated and respected people in the community. He took one loan of 180,000 francs, he has by now paid them 300,000 (and counting). In addition, they seized some of his land (a coffee plantation), which they sold. Criminal.

Anyway, aside from hearing really depressing stories and feeling pretty sad about them, the work went well. The survey I am implementing gets at the socioeconomic condition of households within each community. The goal is to better understand household economies, livelihoods, and the adaptation strategies that households utilize in times of stress. In part, we are trying to better understand how households use and depend on natural resources. It’s been an interesting exercise. Despite the fact that there isn’t a lot of variation from household to household, I’ve learned a lot. In both T’huo and Doromou, people depend exclusively on rain-fed agriculture for food (and income). When crops fail, families turn to the forest and process palm oil or cut and sell firewood, and use the income to buy rice.

As many of you know, my dissertation research seeks to better understand what makes households vulnerable to environmental impacts associated with climate change. I am therefore also interested in understanding the adaptation strategies that can be employed by vulnerable households (to potentially mitigate the impacts of environmental change on their livelihoods and wellbeing). Since arriving in Guinea, I’ve been coming around to the realization that more than any actual environmental change, the bigger threat to people’s livelihoods is actually the way we are managing natural resources in response to real or perceived changes.

While it is important to study how environmental changes will impact livelihoods, I think it is also important to study the effects of our response to real or perceived change. For example, we protect forests to mitigate climate change, and presumably reduce our global vulnerability. But are we in fact increasing local vulnerability? When we protect forests, we tend to restrict access to those forest reserves. In Mt. Nimba, people living around the forest depend upon the forest for their livelihoods, even more so in times of duress. So when we protecting forests, and restrict the use of those resources (to limit deforestation and protect biodiversity), we are in fact further limiting a population’s options for adaptation, and potentially increasing their vulnerability to stress. It’s not really surprising that when we “globally” set aside large reserves, like the Mt. Nimba Forest Reserve, the people who bear the costs of that conservation are the people who are already the most vulnerable to stress should that resource diminish. This is just me scratching the surface, and I don’t mean to over simplify the matter. There are important questions here about environmental justice, and I think these questions demand some deep reflection – on my part, but also on the part of those implementing conservation measures in response to global climate concerns.