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Conducting Ethnography

This week I conducted an oral interview on a local community member. Her name is Marta Ceroni and she is a forest ecologist by trade. I know her through the Dartmouth Argentine Tango society since she is the advisor and I go to the weekly lessons. I decided to interview her because she has experience in international development in an ecological perspective. In class we are always talking about health care, education, nutrition, the revolution etc. and we didn’t investigate possible ecological development that could be done in Nicaragua. She is not too familiar with Nicaragua but her responses can be applied to any development context. I learned a lot about what type of ecological development could be implemented in Nicaragua. In addition, Marta also provided her opinion on some more philosophical questions.

To begin the interview, I made sure that I followed some type of protocol. Thus, I greeted her and thanked her for allowing me to interview her. Rather than start off and startling her with a series of question, I decided to ease her into the questions. I began by asking her where she was from, what she studied in school, where she works, etc. These questions provided a strong foundation for the interview. I began by asking her what exactly constitutes a good development project in a rural and poor country like Nicaragua. She answered with two very good points. She asserted that a country needs to establish a baseline as to where they are and what has has happened before that baseline. In addition, she argued that a country must have a vision that incorporates the local community. She also stressed attacking things at a systemic level rather than just focusing on one solution. Marta works at the Donella Meadows institute which focuses on creating a sustainable economy using a systems thinking approach. Her work everyday consists of solving sustainability problems and she has learned from experience that most problems occur at a systemic level.

Next, I asked her point of view on whether or not short-term service projects like the CCESP make an positive difference. She immediately responded that we shouldn’t discount the feeling that we get when we volunteer because if nothing else, we are empowered to make change and gaining essential practical experiences. Marta expressed that there will always be obstacles in service work and despite the fact that we might not make a life-changing difference, the exchanges and conversations that we have with the locals are enough to justify the trip

We then began talking about what can be done to preserve the integrity of the Bosawás. She commented that there are international treaties in place that protect biospheres like the Bosawás. Obviously, governments are corrupt and simply don’t follow established law. Her proposed solution is to expose the exploitation and colonization of land in the Bosawás in order to create awareness of the problem. If enough commotion is created, Nicaragua will have to abide by the international laws or face global isolation. We finally discussed the ethics of ecotourism more specifically in the Bosawás. Marta argued that ecotourism if done correctly can be ethical. She explained that the ecotourism would have to be run by the locals and they would have to see direct benefits from this tourism. However, if the locals have no say in the situation and if their land is just going to be further exploited, then only more problems are being created. We discussed these topic in a lot more depth and the entire interview can be found on my oral ethnography page.

This was my first experience conducting an interview and it was more difficult than I thought. I found it difficult to give proper feedback and I felt as if I was not acknowledging her very well articulated responses. I would simply move on to the next question. Also, I overextended my questions making them more confusing than they had to be. In addition, in certain instances I would find our discussion getting off topic and I didn’t exactly know how to redirect it without disturbing the flow of the interview. On the other hand, I feel pretty good about my ability to ask questions on the fly and adapt them to comments that she made. Also, I was able to control myself when I wanted to interject and allowed her to complete her ideas.

All in all, this was a very productive experience. Not only did I learn a lot about ecological development and Marta, I was able to successfully conduct an interview and to identify mistakes that I made. I will be conducting an interview in Nicaragua and it will be much different but I hope that this experience helps me to feel more comfortable and gain valuable knowledge from the Nicaraguans.