Research: scholarship thought processes

On reviewing the blog, I can see that there is quite a lot about my experiences in Thailand - what I did, where I went, but very little about what led me to do the research that I did. So here's a summary of how the trip came about.

Towards the end of my MSc in Environmental Assessment and Management at Brighton University, all of us on the course were considering what subjects we would do for our dissertations. It would need to involve a large amount of original research, so choice of an interesting subject was essential. Some people came up with a corker immediately. Hector, for example, decided to study the environmental impact of rock festivals! I had a number of small ideas but they all felt rather dry and contrived.

Then the opportunity to apply for a scholarship to do research for our dissertations in Indonesia or Thailand was announced. The deadline was quite tight and the subject was around women and natural resource management, which seemed both too broad and overly specific. So I started to investigate what  the current natural resource issues were -water? agriculture? As well as general guides and overviews, I read regional newspapers online such as the Bangkok Post.  Fairly soon I started coming across articles discussing the Community Forestry Bill, which at that point was slowly making its way through the Thai Parliament.

From that point I knew I had my subject - community forestry - but there was a lot more to do. I had to come up with a working title and a brief that fitted the terms of the scholarship. I researched the academic papers online, read more general introductory texts and used the IDS library at Sussex for access to original 'grey' sources. There was not much on women, as most of the forestry/gender related studies had been done in India, rather than SE Asia. However, what studies there were gave indications about what the issues might be.

The methodology section was comparatively easy to write,  just carefully following the guidelines produced by the University. I wrote the first draft of the application over the Christmas holidays, had it checked by my tutor, revised it and got it in by the deadline. The deadline then was extended by a further  two weeks, presumably because they wanted more applicants.

I was  given an informal hint that my application was successful in February, but it was not until March that I was given the formal go ahead.

Community Forestry - applying it myself

In the year and a half after my return from Thailand, and after several fruitless attempts to find paid work with a forestry project - the light dawned. I would run my own project! I set out to research what woodland was for sale in my own local area. Gradually, after many visits and fieldtrips to woodland across Sussex, I worked out my criteria. My ideal wood:

• would be less than 20 miles from home (or half an hour's drive), as I would need to reach it regularly
• would be quiet - not under a flight path or near a main road
• would have its own access
• and ideally would be near water (I didn't want the responsibility for water though - or having to learn about dredging or have to worry about foolish passersby falling in and drowning.

Not three months later 15 acres at Old Copse came up for sale and in July 2009 we became the proud owners of our own our progress here:

Old Copse - the story of woodland management near Horsham 

Research results

Just for the record, the final research was written and delivered by the October deadline. The 10,000 words received a distinction, which was sufficient to move my overall score to a distinction. Result! Anyone with an interest in community forestry in Thailand - and in particular the role of women - is welcome to contact me via this blog for a copy.

Sarah

Nong Khiew - proper travellers

150K upriver from Luang Prabang spent an interesting evening with two proper travellers. One- a young Norwegian bloke - had sailed from Norway to New Zealnd in a 22ft boat, across both the Atlantic and Pacific. He had sold his boat in NZ and was making his way home overland. The other, a german in his sixties, was taking six months to cycle from Germany to Bangkok. He had cycled all the way across Russia and China - Siberia vas borink, nothing but birch trees - until the heat forced him to take a bus in Vietnam. After several beers the german got very quite drunk, but the Norwegian remained as perky as ever, showing the kind of stamina it takes to sail around the world single-handedly.

Back to LP on the slow boatthe next day. Five hours of fantastic landscapes and very hard seats.

Tourists in Luang Prabang

LP is a mixture of french colonial and traditional wooden houses. It's a UNESCO world heritage site and the centre almost completely given over to tourism. Very beautiful, but maybe a bit too perfect. All the streets are swept, the pavements (there are pavements!) neatly made out of herringbone brick. However, not far away life carries on as normal.

Did a couple of touristy things, including a trip to the waterfalls where we met the American nurse who had travelled up from Vientiane on the bus (14 hours!). She joined a group of twenty-something Japanese tourists in plunging 8' into the water from an overhanging tree, and received an admiring round of applause.

Vientiane

Laos is very very quiet and a bit bumbly after Thailand. There are only 5m people here in a country the size of GB. Vientiane is tiny! Stayed in grande luxe in a crumbling colonial villa with a wonderful garden (although I did wish they would pick up the empty beer cans).

Laos seems to attract some interesting people. Met a 70 year-old nurse from New York who has spent the last eight months working for Medecins sans Frontieres in Cambodia with HIV patients. She leaves her husband at home and goes volunteering abroad to remote places.

Everyone very keen to practise their English. Got talking to some monks at one of the Wats and ended up giving an impromptu English lesson. We were invited into their room where they had set up a classroom - complete with whiteboard - where they practise English conversation among themselves. Becoming a monk is one way for boys to receive an education. They explained that while they had been monks for four years, they did not expect to be monks forever, and English was necessary to get a good job. Being inside the temple was a bit like being in a boys boarding school. They had boxes of little cellophane wrapped snacks under their beds to keep them going between their one meal a day. So on the whiteboard went: 'Guests eat snacks' - except of course we only ate one tiny packet of Chinese crackers to be polite, as they had so little.

Off to Laos

Caught the night train to Nong Khai - quite rackety. It poured down in the night and the train went very slowly. A group of railway police had a party in the dining car and drank all night. They were still pouring bottles of beer when the train finally got to NK two hours late at ten o'clock in the morning. A big fat cook had to steer them out of the door.

In NK took a tuktuk to the border where we went through a series of checkpoints each designed to extract a different sum of cash: $35 for a visa, plus an extra $1 - because it was Friday? 100 Bt for completing the paperwork, 10 Bt for permission to cross, 15 Bt for the bus ride across the bridge. Then finally through and into Laos.