On Sunday night, Jyoti and I boarded a train for a 22 hour trip north east to Orissa. We arrived in Bubaneswar, Orissa's capital, on Monday evening in relatively good spirits. My first impressions of Bubaneswar is that it is much cleaner and greener than Chennai. (To be fair its populations is small and really not comparable.) It is over run with cows and has many temples. I am finding that I like the Oriyan style of temples. Where as in Tamil Nadu temples are painted in bright colors, in Orissa they have more detailed, unpainted stonework. I am really looking forward to having a chance to visit more this weekend.
Jyoti and I met with Adhikar on Tuesday and Wednesday. There have been some significant shifts in our survey design. It looks like we will survey households in the district of Nayagarh not in Ganjam. This means that we will not be living in Brahmapur as planned. Because of this my role has shifted from doing costing exercises to doing focus groups in villages as we do the listing of households to be surveyed. I still will be access the costs of competitors but I think that I will learn a lot from this qualitative look at Oriyan migrant families. Now we just need to work out all of the details and I need to begin feeling a little better. My stomach has been in varying state of unrest since Sunday and I am hoping that having it feel better will give me a boost of energy. Much need since Orissa is in the monsoon seasons and is a combination of hot, gray, and humid.
I will try to write in more detail about the project soon and will include some pictures from the last week.
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