First day of work at CIRAD

Lucile picked me up for my first day of work at 8am and we drove to CIRAD's office at the Institute of Technology of Cambodia (ITC). The tuktuk drivers are swarming everywhere in the city, you hardly have to wait more than one minute. The campus of the ITC is very green, full of trees and flowers and many students are sitting outside sitting at tables, studying, having conversations, or drinking coffee.

In the building there are many different uses of rooms. Laboratories, classrooms, a library, and offices of several international organizations working for example in rural sustainable development or agroecology. CIRAD has four different locations in Phnom Penh and the one in ITC is one of them. Currently there are Lucile and Mathilde, and three interns working in this office, inculding me. I have met one of them today, a Cambodian girl named Chha Yy. She has worked on an app for the past few months and will present me her preliminary results tomorrow in a presentation. The other intern is Louise. She is a french master student, but currently out of town doing data collection in the fields. These are two pictures of the office:

As Lucile and I arrived in the office, we agreed that my occupation for the day will be to create an overview of the first few weeks of my internship and research work. For the people who don't know yet what my internship is about and what CIRAD is: CIRAD is a french agency, partly financed by French government, and working on agriculture research and development cooperation in agriculture. They have various projects in Cambodia, often in collaboration with local research institutes, organizations, farmers, or other kinds of actors. The project I will be participating in, is about identifying biodiversity indicators for Cambodian rice fields, with the objective to compare agricultural practices and intensity (like for example pesticide use, tillage, or crop rotation) with overall biodiversity in rice rice landscapes. This project is just starting and my internship is probably only the first step for this longer lasting project.

So today I planned the first steps for my internship and decided that the two first weeks I will dedicate to gathering all biodiversity indicators literature has to offer, and categorize relevant agricultural practices which farmers use in rice cultivation. Then, with help of Lucile, we will decide on which indicators we can already exclude, based on the resources CIRAD has.

After these two weeks I might already move to Battambang province, further north, and conduct the first field work. This will entaim either focus group discussions with farmers on their cultivation practices, or testing the first few indicators on their feasability. This is not clear yet because it depends on when exactly the rainy season will start. It could happen any time in the next month and this means, that farmers will plow their fields and saw or transplant the rice.

The day was quite intense, as it was the first day of using my head since at least two weeks. I left work at 5pm and went back to my appartment. I showered and then went grocerie shopping. But I didn't find any müesli:(