Ongoing Activities

These past few weeks since I arrived back in Oudomxay after travelling through Vietnam with Paul have been even crazier than I thought they would be.

On June 13 we had our innaugural meeting to officially start the research phase of our watershed project in the Nam Ko River Basin. We had community leaders from 23 villages meet with us in a central village called Ban Konoy. We also had some government officials from district and provincial offices join us.

It was a interesting day as the staff from PSTEO (my Lao counterparts) organized and planned the entire event. It started off in typical Lao style with all the community leaders and government officials were sat down at tiny little desks (the meeting took place at a primary school) and the staff from PSTEO lectured them for over an hour about being good environmental citizens, what the project objectives are, etc etc. And then the community leaders each took their turn to stand up and say how happy they were to be there, how great the government is for doing such a project, etc etc.

I even had to put in a word (in Lao) and got up and told everyone who I was, that I was glad to be there and that they could call me "Patchit"-guy who travels too much, "Falangnoi"-small foreigner, or "Falangjeun"--fried foreigner, which are my nicknames in Lao. This went over well and finally got a laugh and some smiles out of the room--Lao folks can be far too serious in my opinion.

After this was finally finished, we broke up into working groups of four or five villages, and the staff from PSTEO held discussions about land use and environmental problems. It was very interesting to see what the villagers felt were important environmental issues were and the level of understanding they had of the environment and watershed issues. Some of the issues they identified were: deforestation and lower water flows in the river; restrictions on access to land and resulting shorter fallow periods--meaning the villagers are forced to reuse the same land more often than in the past thus degrading the soil; water pollution; and loss of fisheries.

So, for the next step we will be heading out and doing some in-depth participatory research in 7 of the 23 villages to get a better idea of exactly how all this is happening.

An unfortunate turn of events for another project, the Community Learning Centre assessment with DED, has been put on hold indefinitely, or at least PSTEO's role in it. It seemed as though my counterparts either didn't understand the project or lost interest as I just couldn't get them to do their part. so I had to call DED and let them know that it seemed we wouldn't be able to do any assessment after all. Thankfully, DED has been understanding so far and I don't think it damaged our relationship. The problem is that whenever someone asks PSTEO to get involved in a project they say yes without thinking about whether or not its feasible, so sometimes things fall apart.

The Ban Bo water project has been seeing some rocky ground as well. There has been a lot of confusion between my office and German Agro Action, who approved our project and is supporting us with $2500 USD to put in a gravity fed water system and biosand filters. I won't get into details, but suffice to say at one point this week my bosses called up GAA and politely told them we would no longer do the project as we were tired of all the nonense. GAA responded back, apologizing for the confusion and asking us to please stay on the project. I think we will still do it...at least I hope so for the villagers sake.

Anyways, that's been my last week and a half of fun and games.