the plan, as far as I know it....

A quick update on what I have been doing, and on what it looks like I will be doing…

As of this moment, I am still in Bogor, sitting in my very comfortable air conditioned room with internet in the room and a beautiful forest and river outside my door. On Thursday, I will still have the river and the trees (or so I am told), but I will have electricity for one hour a night, no phone signals, and certainly no internet.

For the last few days I have been reading and talking about what I will be doing in Jambi over the next three months. In short, the project, officially titled “Collective Action to Secure Property Rights for the Poor: Avoiding Elite Capture of Natural Resource Benefits and Governance Systems”, is looking at how to encourage groups of people in rural areas to begin collective action to protect their resource rights, particularly women’s groups. I will be going into the two villages the program is running in and working with the local facilitators on beginning the collective action portion of the program, in particular Participatory Action Research skills and gender. I will also go to the capital cities of the district and lead focus group discussions on PAR for our district level employees. Of course, at this point, they are all words that sound very interesting, but not concrete enough to really know what I am getting myself into. We’ll see.

Basically, the schedule is as follows:
May 26th- June 15: Lubuk Kambing Village
June 16- June 18: (Capital City of Tanjabar province)
June 19- July 8: Sungai Telang Village
July 8-10: Muara Bungo (Capital City of Bungo District)
July 10- 17: Bogor (head office)

While I won’t be able to get email while I am in Lubuk Kambing or Sungai Telang, I will be heading out of the village at least once a week to send reports back to Bogor. So, email me! Goodness knows I will love to have the contact with the outside world.

I also have a new mailing address... best to send things to me c/o Yunety Tarigan, at:
CIFOR
P.O. BOX 6596, JKPWB
Jakarta 10065
Indonesia

I will have my laptop, so I shall be writing. And we’ll see what I’m getting myself in for this time!