It's been a busy month. Mike and I are moving as of a week from today into Olalla Canyon 20 miles outside of Wenatchee. It's been beautiful up there (at 2500 feet), although so far our activities in the area have consisted of driving up, painting the house, driving down, driving up, painting the house, driving down, driving up, dropping off fencing to be put up later, driving down, and more recently, boxing up stuff, driving up, unloading stuff, and driving down. You probably get the point.
The garden we're planning for this summer there is on hold for another few weeks until we get better settled, although I'm hoping to buy some chicks (i.e. baby chickens) at the feed store tomorrow to raise in our bathtub until they get big enough to let loose... Meanwhile we're very lucky and grateful to have had friends come and paint with us (and bring BBQ grills along for making dinner), lend us pickup trucks, and help with all sorts of odds and ends. So, soon our photos will come from a new spot! Stay tuned, but here are a few previews of the hillside, the barn, and the side of the house:
Meanwhile, I have been wanting for a while now to catch you up on work stuff. So I've taken a break from packing this afternoon to do some blog writing, as likely we'll stay busy with house stuff for another few weeks and beyond. Plus Mike is in Alaska until tomorrow, at the long-awaited World Beard Championships, so I'm taking advantage of the quieter house (see video in Anchorage paper http://community.adn.com/mini_apps/vmix/player.php?ID=4239155). (For those of you who don't know Mike, I would direct you to look for the guy with the big beard, but in this case that doesn't really help, now does it?)
So here goes:
Work
Washington State University, where I work, is in the midst of budget cuts. As part of this, there is a proposal to cut my department (Community & Rural Sociology) and lay off all the faculty and staff. This may get modified in the next week or so, but as of now there's some, well, uncertainty about the future. My job is still good through December since I am actually paid not by my department but rather by the Tree Fruit Research Center where I am based. After December it will all depend on whether or not the project I am on finds more funding. Our hoped-for funding did not come through, but there are still other potential options. I had also hoped to jump projects after current funding ran out, but the "jump to" project would have been under the direction of a faculty member from my department currently slated to be laid off. So we'll see.
In any case, this seems to be a good transitiony moment to think (and write) about job stuff, prospects, likes and dislikes, and thoughts for how to proceed from here. So below is a random picture, from the road on the way back from our new house towards town, to represent "transitiony-ness":
See? Transitiony-ness encapsulated :)
Outreach and social science
Anyway, at the moment, I like my job okay. Last month I didn't like it too much -- too much office time, and a lack of pressing deadlines to motivate. Now I am back out of the office more and get to remember that I do actually like seeing things and talking to people, although now of course deadlines for written office-based products are looming close too.
I like that my job asks me to create relationships with environmental groups and farm workers on the part of an institution that has generally done a good job networking with the apple industry but not these other broader stakeholders. It's cool that people are starting to recognize the importance of working not just with people who apply pesticides, but also those concerned about pesticide exposure and pesticide safety as well (as they too are constituents of a public insititution and should have as much access to that institution as the tree fruit industry does).
The tricky part, though, is that the people I work for (and the apple industry more broadly) are not really used to working with these other groups. So I will often come back with ideas or feedback from meeting with groups and be told, "Well, that's nice, but we can't actually do that." So an interest in outreach but lack of follow through. And it's not that industry or WSU has to be responsive to every (or even most) requests, but it is true that "working with new groups" doesn't mean just telling them what a good job we're doing (which I think was implicitly, although probably not consciously, the original idea) -- instead it means actually compromising and negotiating and doing all that harder stuff that makes you, at least initially, more vulnerable.
So it can be frustrating to be given the go-ahead to do outreach but not actually be able to do any of it in a way that I think will be effective. That said, I did just succeed in getting our project to fund 2 health fairs (education on pesticide safety as well as diabetes prevention and other health concerns) at migrant farm worker camps this summer, so that's a definite step in the right direction. Maybe I just need to be more patient, as these sorts of changes take a while (but that is hard when your time frame is a 2-year, now maybe 1 1/2 year post-doc).
Similar issues come up with being a "social scientist" in a natural scientist haven. The entomologists (bug researchers) think it's a good idea to find out why farmers haven't adopted certain pest control practices, so they have me work on surveys, but expect the answers we get back to fit into a puzzle that will let them continue doing what they've been doing as they've been doing it. They're not quite ready to learn from these surveys that getting farmers to farm more sustainably means that not just farmers, but researchers too have to negotiate and change and adapt what they are doing.
Instead, the researchers (subconsciously, it's not really an articulated thing) want me to go out and solve the challenge of getting farmers to adopt new pest control methods and come back and tell them it's fixed so they can continue to research and recommend new methods of pest control. It's not that they're not doing a good job or don't have good intentions -- they really do, but just a little more openness, taking into account the way that humans act and not just the ways that bugs act, could make it work better.
So, again, while there's an interest in expanding the way things are done, there is resistance to changing things too much in the service of that expansion, which really makes both the expansion, and also my job, hard.
One funny example is that researchers get frustrated that apple growers don't accept and adopt their well-researched and well-proven pesticide recommendations. After all, these recommendations have been scientifically vetted. But in order to increase survey response rates to figure out why these growers have not jumped on the bandwagon, when I suggest putting $1 in each survey envelope (which is basically the only known, i.e. scientifically-vetted, way to increase survey response rates), the response is a, "no, that won't really work here."
And whereas it's okay to resist "scientifically demonstrated" recommendations because they may or may not fit a particular situation, or even because you just don't believe in their validity, it's somewhat contradictory to resist them and at the same time not understand why other people (growers) resist your scientific recommendations. Again, a mismatch between understanding how people work and understanding how "science" (or in this case "social science") works.
Health and border issues
Meanwhile, there have been some interesting, perhaps more rewarding, pieces to my job. I've been attending a lot of rural health care and farm worker health focused conferences, which has been a new thing for me. I was just at one in San Antonio, TX (which was really a neat place, actually), and went to a western region one earlier this year in San Diego, CA. In San Diego it was particularly interesting because we were so near the Mexican border that we got to accompany a group down to the border fence and check it out. This was a church-based group that does communion across the fence, in protest of plans to turn the slatted fence there into a solid wall.
The issue with the wall there is that this is a spot where few people actually cross illegally, but where many people come to meet and wave at family members living on the opposite side. So the impact of a solid wall there would be more psychological than preventative. It's an odd spot too because it's right on the beach, and so this fence that separates the Mexican side of the beach from the U.S. side of the beach just extends out into the water and then stops. And people on each side are walking the beach and buying ice creams and selling bracelets and meeting up with family members, and now taking communion in this bilingual strategic religious/protest ceremony, with border patrol looking on. Here are a few photos looking towards Mexico (the bottom one is the city of Tijuana):
Of course this is all tied in to immigration debates, as Mexican immigrants crossing the fence are among the highest profile groups in national debates, even though they are not actually the largest group of immigrants here. But the crossings are dramatic, they involve a relatively high risk of thirst and heat-related deaths crossing the deserts, and yet people continue to come, motivated by the prospect of jobs. U.S. employers are hiring farm workers and construction workers, even in a recession and despite government and societal censure.
For people who come to work in agriculture, theirs is a lifestyle of staying out of the way of border police, and migrating with the crops from California or Texas up to the northern parts of the country and then back. Which makes it hard for people to access health care when needed, and yet they work in high risk jobs where it can be crucial. And many migrants now come from parts of Mexico where not Spanish, but rather Mixteco or other indigenous languages are spoken, providing new linguistic obstacles to accessing health care...
Okay, you're right, these aren't migrant health workers, they are the Wenatchee hospital delegation performing in the Apple Blossom parade (see more details below), but it almost fit!
Anyway, in terms of my job prospects and how they relate to all this, I'm finding what I do interesting enough to stick with it for the moment, or at least while it lasts. Or ideally, to find some way to do it part time and spend more time with more goats and chickens and gardens at our soon-to-be new place. And I'm betting that some new opportunities will arise as the old ones potentially fade. Meanwhile, Mike and I like it here enough to try and stick around a little longer and see what happens.
Not work
What else is new these days outside of work?
Well, the spring green has come and gone in Wenatchee -- there are about three weeks of green here, where hillsides turn from brown to all shades of green (and then fade back to brown). The green is complemented by thousands of wildflowers all over the place. They say (whoever they are) that you get attuned to really light shades of green when you live here. It's only driving to the west side of the mountains that makes you realize that our green, relatively speaking, is not a deep green like theirs is... I guess it's a different kind of pretty.
The Wenatchee Apple Blossom festival has also come and gone, with a big parade down Wenatchee Ave (and some vendors selling Greek food in the park, which I greatly appreciated). Here are a few parade photos, with different pieces of Wenatchee valley culture represented (plus one with the traveling princesses of Penticton from across the (other) border in Canada).
Here are a couple of pictures too of a spring mushrooming trip. Apparently our new soon-to-be home-canyon may also yield mushrooms in spring and fall, according to the funny older guy who sold us the place (and who invited us up last month to visit and see what he had fixed up before the closing and also to feed us cookies and fund our purchase of a washing machine). Funny.
Meanwhile, I've also started teaching beginning Hebrew to a Messianic congregation here -- a group that follows Old Testament practices but concurrently believes in Jesus. It's an odd combination, but kind of fun to be teaching them basics. I also have a bit of an out-standing request to teach Spanish to friends, and the latest thought has been to combine such Spanish lessons with hiking excursions, but we've really been lagging on the hiking front lately. Once we're settled in with the move, we're hoping to get back to some hiking outings and wine tastings and visits to apple orchards south of here owned by guys who remind us of Willie Nelson (or who did when we got to visit this past winter).
Oh, and we're pretty sure that Frosty the goat is pregnant -- she has not been going into heat anymore, and her udder is getting more visible. Of course, we tend to read signs into any changed behavior, like "She's lying down a lot, she must be pregnant" (even though the weather has gotten significantly warmer and more worthy of lying down in the shade) or "She looks fatter around the middle, she must be pregnant" (even though we've reintroduced the goats to grass, which generally makes them bloated -- see pictures of growing grass below!). But still, we're thinking that come August/September, there may be some goat babies around.
With that, I'll go back to packing and moving, and will try to check in again from the new house, once we get ourselves an internet connection working. Here are a couple pictures (and a windy out-the-car-window video!) of our new commute from Olalla Canyon towards Wenatchee (in springtime):
Best wishes and happy end of May!
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