Fishing villages and environmental change

As my first rebound post, I figured it would be a good idea to post a little bit about what I came here to do in the first place--my research. As you probably know, I came here to study how people in fishing communities adapt to environmental change. What this has entailed for me, mostly, has been travelling around to various fishing communities interviewing individual households about environmental change that they've experienced in the past 10-15 years, how that environmental change has affected their ability to make a living, and how they've changed the way they make a living as a result. All in all, I've done about 50 interviews with people in four different villages, and have spent, cumulatively, about 7 or 8 weeks traveling to these villages for my fieldwork.

While I can't say that my research has come out just like I had hoped and expected, it's still been a terrific learning experience, from several perspectives. By traveling to these villages, and staying in each for a week or more, and because of the nature of my interviews, I've had the unusual chance to learn a lot, and in detail, about how rural Cambodians make a living. Before coming to Cambodia, I'd never completed a research project with primary data that I'd collected myself, and my project here has made me realize how doing so can be simultaneously both very easy and very difficult. Last, through the process of planning and preparing for my research, I learned about the challenges of working and researching internationally and within a culture other than my own.

Despite the fact that from the road and to the untrained eye, most Cambodian villages look exactly the same, I found that each of the four villages I studied had a distinct character. For example, Prek Kmeng, in Kandal province, was closer to Phnom Penh, and although it is definitely a rural village, its proximity to the city made it feel much better-off and more cosmopolitan than they other villages. Far more residents of Prek Kmeng have motobikes and a high school education that in any of the other villages, and it was the only village where I interviewed families who had sent their children to university. Chi Ab, one of the villages in Kampong Thom, was located along the national road and as a result, had less of a tight-knit community feel to me. Preah Naingkaol, also in Kampong Thom, was set off from the main road and had far less fishing than any of the other villages I visited. It had a lot of aid from NGOs--wells, latrines, and even houses around the village had "donated by..." plaques on them. Kampong Prak is a floating village on the Tonle Sap, which makes it very different from the other villages to begin with. But the people there seemed different from the others too--despite the fact that this was the poorest village I visited, the people there were the most hospitable and open.

The biggest impression I'll take away from my research here is how resourceful and resilient Cambodians are in the face of really drastic environmental change and degradation. Nearly everyone I interviewed said that they have to work harder and longer and still catch fewer fish than in the past. Better-off families, especially in the upland villages, have been able to move their energy away from fishing as this has happened--they've invested in taxi-driving businesses, started cultivating a second crop of rice during the dry season, started farming more intensively, begun raising fish and pigs, and more. But for families on the lake, and the poorest, landless families upland, there are often few options other than fishing. They are forced to spend more time fishing, use illegal fishing methods, or sell their labor to other villagers, on sugar cane plantations in Thailand, or in garment factories in Phnom Penh. With the combination of these activities, and exploiting other wild resources such as picking wild plants, catching frogs and crickets, and collecting snails and freshwater clams, they are able to get by. Still, the lives of many of these people are getting harder and harder every year, and are sure not to get easier as climate change accelerates, resource exploitation intensifies, and dam construction on the Mekong begins. In the current stage of my research, I'm writing up my results from my fieldwork, and thinking about ways to best increase the adaptive capacity of people in fishing communities so that as environmental change continues and accelerates, they will have the tools to cope with it and maintain their livelihoods.

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Preparing for and carrying out the research itself, as I wrote above, was simultaneously very difficult, and very easy, and this process taught me a lot of lessons about working and researching in a different cultural context. To start with the difficulties: In the planning stages of my research, I had a major setback that ended up being a really valuable learning experience. I was hoping to use some of the data collected by an organization (that will remain nameless) as background for my project. I could probably write several blog posts about this series of events itself, but I'll spare you all the details. To make a long story short, they were very very very slow to give me any of this data, which I wanted to secure before starting my fieldwork--since I would go to villages where they had worked in the past if they did share with me, and to others if not. As the time went by, I because more and more stressed about the delay and the fact that I hadn't started my fieldwork and I got more and more impatient and assertive in my requests. Eventually, the relationship dissolved and I didn't get any of their data and had to find new study villages.

This whole process took several months and after the whole thing I felt very very behind on my research, like I had wasted a lot of time dealing with them. However in retrospect, and the reason I bring this up here, is that this whole debacle was actually one of the most valuable learning experiences that I've had in Cambodia. My failure, which after much thought I don't think is entirely my fault (for a variety of reasons which I will not go into here), was in part a result of my lack of understanding of the cultural context of working in Cambodia. I didn't work within the hierarchy of unnamed organization properly; I (unknowingly) was talking with both upper and lower level staff members at the same time which resulted in some of them feeling like I was trying to manipulate them and that I didn't properly respect people's superiority in the organization. At the same time, as a young woman attempting to work with a bunch of older Cambodian men, I think I was more assertive than a young woman is expected to be, and I failed to show proper deference for those above me in the hierarchy. While I knew going into this on some level that Cambodia is a hierarchical society, I naively thought in dealing with this organization that if I demonstrated intelligence, competence, confidence, and willingness to cooperate, people would be happy to work with me.

This whole experience has made me think a lot about working abroad and what sacrifices I am willing to make in order to do so. While I've always been willing, in theory, to adjust my working and living styles to another culture, I had never before thought about what I would do if this meant letting go of some the values that I hold most dearly: for example, accepting being judged not on merit but on status, and behaving differently around men because as a younger woman I am expected to. I still don't know exactly where I'd draw the line on this, but I have realized that working successfully in another culture is more than just learning to bow instead of shaking hands and dressing according to cultural norms, and may involve pushing the limits and learning to let go of some of my principles.

After this was all sorted out, and it came time for actual fieldwork, I was amazed at how easy it was to get started. Even though my Khmer skills are OK and improving every day, I hired a translator to help me with my research. To get started in each village, he and I would just show up in a village, ask around where the village chief's house was, ask the village chief if it was ok to research there for a few days, and ask him where we could stay. It was so easy to find someone to host us and cook our meals for a few dollars a night, and the village chief in every case was happy to have us in the village. Then, we just walked or moto-ed around the villages to various people's houses, who, if they were home, almost always had an hour to spare to talk with me. I was struck by how flexible people were, happy to make time and space for me at very short notice. At the same time, this part was also exhausting, as it was comprised of spending 9-10 hours a day in the heat conducting the same interview over and over. Staying over in the villages was also very challenging, as I had almost no privacy and there were people staring at my every moment of every day. Despite this, doing the actual fieldwork for my research was the most rewarding and enjoyable part of my stay here so far, and I hope that my work in the future will give me a chance to do similar things again.

PS--to see pictures of my study villages and from my fieldwork, check out my recent facebook albums--they're all there!