Cleaning data

August 3, 2009

After returning from Tulear, I needed a day of rest. My days were filled with running between offices of key people and shopping for on-site necessities between appointments. The shops are only open between 8 – 12 and 3:30 – 6 which, inconveniently, is also the time people are in their offices. So getting to the stationery store to buy printer cartridges between appointments was a sweaty endeavor; even worse was that the crisis means that the South African exporter of boxed wine has shut operations, so there was no boxed wine to be had in the entire city! GASP! My time was also made extra stressful because of poor BV communication and coordination. Two things happened: a guy in Tulear was apparently told by the on-site project coordinator that he could ride back with us, but we were told by the project coordinator before leaving that under no circumstances were people allowed to ride in the back of the 4x4. The guy in Tulear sent me multiple pissy text messages, but I could only say I had no idea what was going on.

The second thing was a bigger deal. I had scheduled an interview with the Director General of the fisheries export company. This is a key interview for me. Unfortunately, it degenerated into a bitch-fest about the lack of communication from BV. I was caught in a storm that had been brewing for years before my arrival. The company has been an advocate of the marine protected area from the beginning, and a partner in many of the activities (such as developing sea cucumber aquaculture as a source of alternative livelihoods for the villages). From everything I have read and heard in interviews, COPEFRITO is a very progressive company. Of course, they are a for-profit business, but by all accounts, their model seems to be to help their profit by helping ensure sustainable resource management. They really do seem to be practicing a triple bottom line model. It seems that the current management of the growing MPA has some partnership re-building to do.

To make a long story short, the potential enormous harvests on opening day requires all of the export companies' trucks and boats. This implies that the equipment cannot be collecting elsewhere. This is a major risk for the company: it opens up their other areas to competitors and they might not have enough production from this one, remote area to fill all the trucks. Moreover, the villages have decided to open all the reserves at once, and have scheduled that opening for the lowest day of the spring tide. That will be the day that all villages along the 400 km coastline that COPEFRITO normally covers (Velondriake is only 10% of that) will be harvesting that day. This increases the company's foregone collections from other areas. It also means there is a risk that there will be an enormous glut that the factories cannot process (opening day plus lowest tide). In other words, there may be no buyers for the octopus harvested opening day, or the price could drop out. Neither of these seems like a good result for our MPA.

The Director General of the company complained that BV seemed resistant to compromising the desire of the villagers (open all at once at the lowest tide) to accommodate the company's logistical and market constraints. So for 3+ hours the staff of the company and Georgi (BV sea cucumber leader) and I discussed this, trying to forge a potential solution. It was very tense because I found myself stepping out of my role as researcher, and back into project management (yet with no authority to make decisions, and all the while messing up the neutrality of my data collection). At the end of the day, I didn't end up with the data I need to do my immediate analysis. Looking on the bright side, I suppose I have some wonderful data on the larger supply chain linkages and constraints.

Speaking of data, I now have raw data from octopus collection from 2004 through 2009!!!!! I started to clean up the datasets (for example, find where we are missing data), and now my miracle worker RA, Haj, is on the case. His long-term knowledge of the project has sped the process up by orders of magnitude (he can so easily find misspellings of village names, multiple names for fishing sites, etc.). Hopefully by the time I get back from Tana on the 14th, we will have a workable dataset! WOOHOO! Haj and I decided that we would make this the master dataset and erase all others that anyone has around. I told him that we will put his name as the primary citation for the dataset – people can use it, but the list of folks responsible for collecting and cleaning it should be clearly acknowledged.

This afternoon, I will call to see the likelihood of the flight departing Morombe on Sunday (it depends on how many people have paid for tickets). If the chance is less than 50% I might take a 2-day taxi brousse trip south to Tulear to fly out on the a-bit-more-certain daily flights. (The taxi brousse rides are reported to be hellish – 40 people crammed into the back of a truck, riding squished over 2 days, sleeping in an unknown village along the way...have I mentioned the fleas in the villages, yet? Yeah. Fleas. Everywhere.) If the Morombe flight is going, how to get to Morombe? I may hire a pirogue to sail me there, unless there is a taxi brousse going (2 hours – not too hellish). Travel here is a game of weighing probabilities: Will there be a flight? Will there be wind? Will there be a taxi brousse? Will the taxi brousse break down? Again, it's a good thing we have Plans A, B, and C.

I'll keep you all posted. ☺