I have no idea the value of a rupee

An important part of research is to record observations.  These can be of anything you find significant: feelings about people or places, facts you find out along the way that may seem tangential to your work for examples news articles, and interpretation of who you are as a researcher.  This last point is especially important because one’s personal perceptions can really get in the way of relaying the information being presented back into the thesis or final report as accurately as one is able. 

One of the many, many small shops that sell just
about anything you can imagine.

If you can imagine, something I’ll have to think about is how I approach ‘participants’ (people I hope to interview), how they view me, how I am viewing them and so forth. I’ll have to make sure I say the same thing to each person and present the opportunity to participate the same way to each and every person. Not only that, some participants will be non-English speaking farmers who maybe don’t interact with foreigners that often. They may expect things from me, they may be suspicious, they may be perfectly honest and normal… it’s hard to say how each individual will react and yet despite that, it is the researcher's job to strike up a rapport and build trust to ensure an accurate interview.

Further to that I realized today that I really have no concept of the value of one rupee to the very poor and vulnerable.  My first day here I went to buy a SIM card (a bit of an ordeal because of the government controls on who can sell them and the need to provide a photo and passport copy) so after wandering around after dark and in my jetlag haze I found a place to sell me one. The guy charged me 3000 rupees (~$30 cdn) for the card and said it was loaded with what sounded like a lot of phone use.  At the time I had the inkling that it was a lot but I had other goals in mind like texting Nathan and finding my hotel again so I could hit the hay.  So I set it up, paid him and off I went.

The next day after very minimal texting it stopped working because it had run out of credit. I was baffled so I went to the guys at the front desk to ask what was up and when they heard how much I spent on it they were completely dumbfounded. They were sure I was confused and spent only 300 rupee, but I hadn’t.  I quite specifically remember pulling out three, 1000 bills and laying them on the table.  At any rate, I went with one of the guys to seek justice and walked all over where I had been to find the shop but to no avail. It was like chasing a dream. I looked around the next day as well but honestly, it was like it had just disappeared entirely.

So I chocked it up to “ask more questions” and “listen to Nathan telling you that you made a mistake and carry on” and sort of forgot about it. I felt really embarrassed for being ripped off but there was nothing I could do. 

A shop owner making religious flags and meditation pillows.

This is becoming a rambling story but it made me realize a couple of key things. One, the guys at the hotel tittered about it several times later and kept asking me if ‘I found the guy’.  They were very concerned about losing 'that much money'. And two, when I met with the director of the development college he relayed a story to me about a cooperative project wherein they convinced men to quit smoking one or two cigarettes a day so they could save the cost of one rupee, and by year’s end they could have 365 rupee to buy into a cooperative that would collect it as seed monies for a savings and loan project.  Save 1 rupee a day for a year and they could literally change their lives.

I have no great conclusions for this conundrum. By the end of writing this I will have paid my lunch bill for about 400 rupee and probably at the end of the day I’ll buy dinner for about the same and while I won’t think 'nothing' of it, I may see it as the way things are, or rather that its the way things are for me.  While I do realize that because of my world view (my lens, my personal experiences and perceptions) it is hard for me to really appreciate the value of one rupee right now, I hope that by being involved in research with farmers at the business level I can be part of a larger movement of more appropriate development that looks at raising the standards for many, many small farmers one rupee at a time.