No rainbow at all because no rain!!

Halftime! The stressful situations I wrote about in the last blog entry have become fewer. Especially after a holiday with my parents visiting, where I could recharge my batteries! I showed them around in Battambang for some days, and then we took the Bus to Siemreap. Having my parents here and spending time with them was lovely and it was great to share experiences and the life I'm having here with them.

In the week after my parents' visit, me and my coworker started with larger insect diversity assessments. Being in the fields more often feels much better than being in the office. In the past month we have been working on insect collection in the rice fields. Many methods of collection had to be adjusted over time and defining the sampling design is also an ongoing process. Everything takes a bit more time than I anticipate but it's still all ok.

Here in Battambang we are still waiting for the rain to come. While in other regions of the country the rainy season has started to set in, it has stayed mostly dry in the Battambang province, altough it is normally expected to start by the beginning of June. Most of my insights into the impacts of the missing rain on humans and nature are limited to the region of the irrigation scheme, where I'm working at, about 20km south from Battambang.

In this area, covering roughly 60km2, most of the land is cultivated with rice with only few small patches of other crops. The irrigation scheme is organized in a cooperative and is geographically structured in a clever way, intended to supply the area with water coming from the upland, located further south. But the missing rainfalls have made it difficult to distribute the water in a way, that everyone benefits from the canals. Even though the farmers pay the same amount of money per hectare for irrigation - the ones further from the main canal are coming short on their share. While the rice right by the main canal is already flowering, the rice plots further away are suffering from drought damage. It is possible that some farmers have to re-saw the rice. With the increased gas and fertilizer prices, this a hard year.