Monthly Archives: May 2009

The Not-So-Short Version of the Long Story of How I Found Myself in Nepal

May 28, 2009

*[Editor's Note: Remember that bit about not being succinct? I've broken this part into two sections, with the first part below, so read that first. I'm still figuring out how to order posts, so bear with me if things move around a bit. And I promise no post will ever again be as long as these two! -M-]

…

What I realized while sitting alongside my little stream, on the day in early April when I backpacked alone, was that I like thinking about how people related to the natural world, and specifically to the resources that we all depend on, and value aesthetically. I am partial to forests, myself, and am also very interested (particularly these days) in issues of access to clean drinking water and sanitation, and so for me it was clear that I was headed towards trees, and water.

Trees were perhaps my first love in the outdoors, from the cherry blossom tree that was planted in our front lawn at the time of my birth, which I’d grown up climbing, all the way through to summers spent wandering in the woods near upstate NY where my grandmother kept a cottage, with my Peterson’s Field Guide to Medicinal Plants in hand. I would study forests, forest management, and the way they relate to water (to be very simplistic, intact and generally undisturbed forests help to clean and purify water more effectively than disturbed or poorly managed ones do), and I would use the opportunity of returning to graduate school to do research on forests in another country, both so I could have intimacy with and expertise in a specific place, and so that I could leverage that technical scientific background to obtain a better, more influential, position in the international environmental non-governmental organization (ENGO) world I’d begun to claim as my own.

I knew that forest management research would be satisfying, and enjoyable to me, and that publishing the results of my research (which is required for the FES Master of Environmental Science degree, which I am pursuing) would be of great benefit to me as a professional. I knew that the international element would prove to be important personally and professionally, but decided before beginning school that I was reluctant to return to Latin America and so would look elsewhere, even though it was the most obvious destination for someone with a Latin American Studies minor, who speaks fluent Spanish, and who lived in Ecuador and Peru during study abroad to do her research. But I was afraid I would compartmentalize myself as a Latin American specialist, rather than being well-positioned for a Staff Scientist role or, more ideally, an Associate Director of Scientific Programs type of position at an ENGO, and so decided I would instead do my research in either Asia or Africa.

When I was not selected by my first choice of academic advisors and was placed instead with a faculty member who focused on Nepal, Bhutan, and Thailand, I felt that the decision had serendipitously been made for me – I would go to Asia. Nepal and Bhutan were both on my short list of countries I was interested in doing research in (as were South Africa, Argentina, Kenya, and China), and to have a professor who specialized in this area of the world seemed the easiest route to making such a huge transition in geographic specialization in a well-supported way. I knew I would learn whatever language was spoken in the country I visited (I think this is very, very important, and will touch on it again in later posts), and that I would need to work that much harder if I was to be ready for an international field season relatively “by myself,” in a country I had never been to before, which I didn’t even decide on until the first week of October, a scant seven months before I’d leave for the field.

In the end, I settled happily on Nepal and learning Nepali, as I thought that the community forestry system in Nepal, where local community members who depend on the forest for their livelihood are put in the position to manage the forest as a committee, was fascinating, and I thought the lessons that could be derived from research there were more widely applicable than those in Bhutan. Bhutan limits tourism by a very savvy practice of charging an astronomical daily rate for tourism, and as such has a steady flow of income and less evident impact of external interference (as in, cultural pollution from other more developed countries as a byproduct of globalization and tourism), than Nepal does. It would be less expensive to do research in Nepal, and there was a strong community of Nepali students at FES who I was getting to know, and who I knew would help me to prepare for a summer in their home country.

So I decided on Nepal, and committed myself to it with determination. I read everything I could find, checked out every book that had Nepal and forest in its keywords across four or five different Yale libraries, and enrolled in Yale’s Directed Independent Language Studies program, to be paired with a Nepali student as a language partner for the spring semester, that I might begin to acquire language skills. I aggressively pursued and eventually was awarded the funds to travel to Nepal on a prep trip for three weeks over my spring break, and used the time to network with professors, make arrangements for my accommodations, and take a two-week long Nepali language intensive. I short, I did everything I could reasonably (and sometimes unreasonably) fit into a busy graduate student’s schedule, in order to be ready for this experience.

And so that, at long last, is how I came to be here. I’m studying community forestry because natural resource management by the people who depend on the resource appeals to my values, my politics, and my person, and because the kinds of questions you can ask about how such participation in management has impacted the participant’s perception of their world, and their role in it, are amazing. I love the idea of going into the villages and talking about trees and plants, and how they’re used, with community members, and I love that in research we have this unique opportunity to share knowledge in both directions – to learn from the community members instead of expecting them to just learn from us. I came here in part because I wanted to experiment a little with personal philosophies about international collaboration and field research in less-developed countries, as well, and will delve into that more in a later post. But I value about Nepal that on the subject of community forestry, the Nepali PhDs and professors are by and large the world’s experts, and I like how putting myself into the position of a learner in this country subverts the dominant development model oh-so-slightly.

Traditionally, the US and other developed nations have participated (and at times, intruded) actively in the development of countries like Nepal through USAID and other organizations, sometimes with mixed results. This has absolutely been the case with forest management, and it is interesting to see how now we have learned to step back just a bit, and see what is happening in the place we seek to help before we go in there and “help” them right into a dramatically degraded forest (this actually did happen). I think we have learned that we can no more institutionalize development abroad than we can “decide” to build democracies  – what we must do instead is support the work of the people in the countries where the work must happen, asking them what they need, and what they want, in terms of skills, ideas, and resources, rather than telling them what to do and how to do it, or that they must do it as we have. I cherish the way agency is daily restored to Nepal and Nepalis, and community forestry is a terrific model system through which to explore that transition.

There are many examples of how this has happened and how it has, at different times, succeeded and failed, but this blog post (or these two!) grow a little long in the tooth, so I’ll leave it at that, for the moment. Suffice to say that my coming to both Yale and Nepal was as much about a long, serendipitous sequence of events as it was about me knowing myself, and what I needed at the time when I was making the decision. It reminds me of that chorus of the song that always sticks in my head, about how “you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.”

-M-

Posted in: Culture, Research, To Be a Scientist, Travel, Uncategorized – No Comments

The Not-So-Short Version of the Long Story of How I Found Myself at Yale

May 27, 2009

Coming to Nepal, for me, had a lot to do with happenstance, and a long series of questions I had to work through before returning to school to begin my graduate education.

I applied to Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies last year after a long research process, during which I wasted untold amounts of time reading extensively about graduate programs and faculty members, and spent too little time just emailing and speaking with the professors with whom I thought I might want to work, which is what one should actually do if one wants to go to graduate school and pursue a Ph.D. In the end I decided on about four programs to apply to for a Ph.D. in Forest/Natural Resource Management, and tacked Yale on as an afterthought, at first, because I loved the sound of their program but would only be considered for a Master’s, since I didn’t yet have one. I thought this policy of Yale’s to be an obviously archaic remnant of a past in which attending graduate school was both rarer and cheaper, and it annoyed me. Professors I had worked with in the field in several different states had told me for years, at that point, never to pay for graduate school, so I was not really even open to considering Yale, to tell the truth, nor did I think I would necessarily get in.

In perhaps a telling move I did, however, drive a rental car the seven hours from DC to Connecticut to attend an open house in December of 2008, and promptly fell right in love with it. To me the air was electric with the possibility of progress in the conservation field, and the community was rich with a wide diversity of people and perspectives. The day I spent at Yale was gorgeous, and everything it should be on such a historic campus. As our program ended around 4pm I remember looking out the window to see thick, lush, plump white snow coming down in what might be fairly termed a blizzard, frosting the historic campus and all of its beautiful stonework with the kind of snow that is straight out of a Christmas movie. I, who since moving to DC had been craving a proper winter, and some decent snow, felt it get bumped up a notch in my list of priorities right then and there, and rationalized myself into promoting it to a pseudo “safety school” in case I was not admitted to a Ph.D. program, and decided I would apply.

This is where we will begin to take the condensed version, for in addition to being a cumbersome part of my personal tale, many of the people likely to be reading this blog, at its beginning, already know the story. A handful of days before the application due dates began to come upon me in January of 2008, fate and my personal life (perhaps I should say my love life) conspired to throw me a wicked curveball, and for reasons not worth going into, my life plan was abruptly altered. In the end I applied only to Yale before I completely lost my momentum, for it had the earliest deadline, and then did not apply to any of the other schools I had invested so many hours in researching and contacting. Generally a strong writer, I completed a terribly sub-par, half-hearted, un-edited essay the night that the application was due, hit submit right as the deadline struck, lay down on the floor of my bedroom, and cried. Submitting the application in this way wasn’t how I’d planned for things to go, and in a protracted moment of vulnerability I no longer felt sure that graduate school was what I wanted, or needed. I suddenly found that I, with all my short-term plans and long-term derivations, who always was heading in dozens of different directions and fully expected to pursue them all, didn’t know what I wanted any longer, and didn’t much care what I needed, either.

So it was that I went on with life, transferring into a short-term contract job for the few months I had expected to have to myself before summer and a return to school, and didn’t think about what was next. I was so disenchanted and lost that I pretty much forgot I had applied to Yale altogether, to be truthful, with the exception of a slight morbid curiosity that I felt around the time when the applicants were to hear back from the school. It occurred to be that being rejected from the only school I had applied to, the one that I had originally thought would be my backup plan, would really be the bitter frosting on the nasty little cake I was eating, in those days. And so finally, one Friday afternoon after a long week of work, when I was in the process of summoning my willpower to kick in that last hour of productivity, my phone rang with a 203 number and I rapid-fire googled to see if I wanted to take the call. It was the area code for New Haven, Connecticut, where I knew not a soul other than the admissions people and a smattering of professors, from Yale. When I hesitantly answered I was brightly greeted by the Director of Admissions from FES, and wondered briefly and seriously whether they now did rejections in person, over the phone. If so, I thought, this Yale University might actually be the world class institution everyone seemed to think it was.

The end of the story should seem obvious, given previous posts that announce my presence and affiliation, but my path had more twists in it than one might guess. I was of course being called to be notified I had been accepted (to my mild shock), and I remember managing the call very professionally and calmly, as if it were a work call, perhaps seeking to prove to myself and to this admissions director who had just given me her benediction that I was worthy of the gift. After I got off the phone I stepped away from my desk, flopped on my bed, and just stared at the ceiling fan for awhile, not shouting or laughing or running to tell my roommates, but just trying to work my mind around it, with a little smile slowly spreading across my face. I think I cried a little then, too.

Shortly after that lovely Friday afternoon phone call I received my financial aid package, had a serious conversation with my parents about finances, debt, and financial priorities, and decided I would decline. The cost was atrocious, I had been awarded no scholarships or grants, not even a Student Asisstantship, despite having only made $30,000 the year before, and only having about $5,000 in the bank.  Although I could apply to a myriad of scholarships and grants, there was no guarantee I would actually be awarded one (and I wasn’t feeling optimistic given the fact I’d received nothing from the school), and the process of applying would be horribly time-consuming. I began to tell my closest friends this news, and one by one, they (or you, for those who are reading) began to tell me that I was, in fact, and contrary to my own opinion, going to Yale. I cherish the memories of these conversations, for at a time when I didn’t recall what I wanted or needed for myself, my friends recalled what I wanted and needed for me.

I had two particularly memorable conversations at this point. The first was a night out at my former roommates Brighton and Fred’s then-new house, with Julius and Rachel, our friends, all of whom know me pretty well. At that point I had been accepted for short enough time to still be shocked, and long enough to know I was not going to go. And as I told this to my friends over candlelight, pizza and a particularly tasty bottle of red wine that I’d be willing to bet Julius picked out, Fred, who was still fresh from work in his slacks and button-up shirt, looked at me fondly through thin, wire-framed glasses, leaned back into his chair, crossed his long legs in front of him, arms draped lazily over his head, and said with great finality in his big, deep voice, “Meredith: you are going to Yale.” And one by one the others repeated it, little smiles on their faces, with the two boys taking the lead on laying out the argument for why I would go to Yale, and relish it, and not worry about the details (also known as $70,000 of new debt). I remember being a little shocked and peevish about not being taken seriously for my “decision,” and then looking around at their supportive, bemused faces, and just feeling really loved.

In the days that followed I felt persuaded to want to go for the reasons they had laid out, but paralyzed by fear of the debt. And so I called Greg, my best-friend and most brilliant sounding board, whose judgement I trust so deeply that he is often both judge and jury on my hair-brained ideas, to see if I could make my argument against going cleanly enough that he would allow it to pass muster. I think, in hindsight, that I was looking for his permission to give up. I also think that were he to have given it to me, I actually might have. So we talked through the numbers, the ideas, the value added to my person and thinking and lost to my credit. And Greg, with whom my friendship has crisscrossed thousands of miles and several continents without a moment’s hesitation, whom I almost never see in person for more than a day’s time, but who is always my first phone call with news both substantial and trivial, unknowingly reiterated my DC friends, verbatim: “Mer: you’re going to Yale.”

And then he made three good points. The first, that if I came to the end of my life, and looked back, and was wondering what might have gone differently had I done otherwise, going to Yale would surely be on the list, were I to decline. The second, that the way our economic system is set up in America, we will always carry debt from some loan or other, between our cars, our homes, our payment plans, our education, and the like, so what nobler reason to acquire this debt than to educate yourself, and in so doing enrich your life? When I replied that I wanted to buy a house, in some eventuality, and would have to put off doing so for several years (an argument that held significant water with my mother), he brushed it aside. If you’re going to be in a position to be making payments to others for the rest of your life, he argued, why not start by paying for an experience that changes the way you experience the world? Plus, it wouldn’t kill me to rent. And finally, not quite a rationale so much as an ultimatum, this friend of mine who is closest to me in the world, probably the one and only for whom, were he to suggest I should go jump off a bridge, I would at least go to the edge to look and see what was under the bridge and take it under consideration, said in the most dead-serious, and convincing tone he could muster, “And, seriously, seriously Meredith, I’m not going to be your friend if you don’t go.”

These two stories still make me grin, and will warm my heart for a very, very long time. Nonetheless, unable to render a decision so big from the midst of my life in DC, I decided the last weekend before the decision was due to rent a car, and took off straight after work for a weekend alone in Shenandoah National Park, where I would do a three-day solo backpack through the park before I could come to a decision that was truly mine. Influenced more than a little bit by my yoga practice, where you are invited to “declare (to yourself) an intention for your practice” which you will focus on resolving through the movements and meditation, I decided the trip was in fact a meditation in itself, and that while walking I would figure out what I was going to do about this Yale nonsense I’d gotten myself into. I cringe a little to share all this detail (so much for a short version, eh?), but it is the true evolution of me getting myself back to school, no matter how hippie-dippie-earth-mama or cheesy it sounds. The intention I settled on for my walk was for me to make this decision about my future, and stick to it.

And so early on in the second day of my hike I came across a little stream, beautiful, cool, and clear in the sun, and sat down on its banks, and just stared into it for a little while, deciding to start with square one – what did I love to think about most in the world? What provoked me? What goals did I want to work towards in my life? I worked slowly through the re-establishment of my identity all the way through to the last question, which was “what do I need to do next to be able to work effectively on the thing (environmental conservation, and the way people interact with natural resources) I had identified as mattering most?” And so when I got up three hours later, I was going to Yale.

-M-

Posted in: Friendship, Research, Self-Discovery, To Be a Scientist, Uncategorized, Yale and FES – 4 Comments

“And Now, for My Second Act, I Will Brush My Teeth”

May 26, 2009

Last night I dreamt that I was having people over, and the doorbell kept ringing. Every time I went to spend time with the guests who had already arrived, the doorbell would ring insistently and I’d reluctantly tear myself away from a newly started conversation in order to somewhat peevishly go let another guest in.

When I woke this morning in the sterile beach resort that is the ‘Transit Room” of the Indira Ghandi International airport in Delhi, I realized I had been the crazy American girl down the row, ensconced in a carefully embezzled ‘Jet Airways’ blanket from my last flight, curled up on the uber-modernist designed metal and black foam lounge chairs, chattering to myself (and my guests) in my sleep. I was spending the evening in the holding pen where cheapskates like myself, who would rather have a cheap ticket than a good night’s sleep (or a direct flight) come to pass as many as fifteen hours sprawled out on a long, single row of industrial-style lounge chairs that run the length of a single, glassed-in room, lit brightly as a tanning bed by the combination of overhead lights, gleaming white tiles, and spotless glass (which I’d spent my last trip here watching get cleaned…for eight hours).

The lay of the lounge (to give it more credit than it is due) gives one the feeling of being amidst a long line of lounge chairs at the beach, but with the beach in a tanning bed…in an airport…in India. Looking through the glass once in place on the chairs one sees one of the many central hallways of the airport, complete with young Indian professionals walking briskly past on their way to something more important than a motley crew of white bideshi (foreigners, in Nepali) curled into crazy pretzels and wearing whatever they brought in their carry-ons (Mickey Mouse beach towels, dressy women’s scarves, several different pieces of clothing wrapped around different segments of torso, and most comically, their heads…) to try to stay warm, make it dark enough to sleep, and generally just wile away the hours. The cumulative effect is of being on a highly sterile beach, on an industrial-quality lounge chair, looking homeless, feeling desperate, and being a zoo exhibit for those Indians bored enough to glance inside and laugh at the spectacle.

For a $1,145 roundtrip ticket to Nepal, however, worse things could happen.

After glancing around this morning to make sure no one had been too perturbed by my irrational, increasingly annoyed sounding babble to the guests who just wouldn’t stop ringing my doorbell (which, as it turned out, was actually the little bell that chimes before an announcement over the public address system, which goes off constantly!), I took to the bathroom to get washed up and brush my teeth before my final flight segment, a one-and-a-half hour jaunt over the border and into Nepal. I was and remain oblivious to the time of day, as it is dark outside and my watch is still on New Haven time. I do know for certain, however, that it is 7:38pm Tuesday, May 26th, on the US east coast.

Now, about this bathroom. I have fond memories of this bathroom because on my first trip to Nepal, in March, I stumbled into this bathroom late one night, drunk with jetlag and eyelids sticky with contacts left in too long, and was pleasantly surprised how nice it was. Literally, with a chaise lounge or two, it could be the bathroom for a three or four star hotel in New York City. Well-lit, with elegant marble, clean surfaces, and an attendant (I always feel bad for attendants – imagine if your job was to listen to women poop all day, without any natural light?), it was pretty glam for the Indira Ghandi, I thought. Pleased by the overall appearance but focused on the task at hand, I, in my pseudo-intoxicated state, staggered into a stall, shut the door around my large and ungainly backpack, and was appalled to find, to my great shock, nothing but a little hole in the ground. I grin now just recalling how utterly floored I was, and wish there had been a video camera handy to capture the look on my face. The fanciness of the bathroom had prevented me from anticipating anything other than a western-style toilet, and in my groggy surprise I tripped backwards over myself, out of the stall, and stood by the sinks, contemplating my next move. It was only then that I realized the stall doors had little silhouette diagrams on them, indicating the type of commode inside.

So today I made a beeline for the “toilet” stall, did my thing, and stepped outside to change from glasses into contacts before the final flight. The attendant stood by watching with the kind of death-by-boredom that I associate with calculus class until I took out my lens case, and began fishing around with carefully cleaned fingers for my left lens. Suddenly, she was riveted. This lovely young woman, probably about twenty, stood not a foot and a half from my arm, silenced by the language barrier we had failed to overcome when I said hello, and stared in absolute rapture. I’m taking mouth open, eyes wide and shining with interest, not moving. Maybe not even breathing – I’m not totally sure.

All of which, of course, made it that much easier for me to put my contacts in. Nothing like a crowd to get lens-weary eyes to accept sticky little spheres of barely-breathable plastic. After five minutes of trying and a second dip in the lens solution, I did eventually succeed in inserting the source of my vision, and looked over through saline-rimmed eyes in a moment of triumph – although to my slight surprise and disappointment, my audience didn’t clap. I think she contemplated it, though.

As I moved on to brush my teeth, glancing nervously over and smiling through a mouth of foamy white wintergreen flavoring, she kept on staring, until she realized I had no analogously bizarre apparatus to apply to my mouth, and two other Indian women walked in. But it’s the moments like these that make travel so fun, and so interesting, and these that I relish most.

-M-

Posted in: Adventure, Culture, Travel – No Comments
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