After the spring break for a week, the plan was to do a field visit, a kind of a pilot and recce dry run to tweak and revise their actual research method and tools as needed. However, with the spread of the corona virus across the globe and in India, the uncertainty about the future in the coming weeks was looming large. For one, due to the concern of worsening situation in the US of A, our Cornell students were called back to return home. And so this week we bid adieu to our two students who were terribly disappointed at this turn of events.
Our local students still decided to go ahead and do one field visit, from Wednesday/Thursday to Saturday and get some field experience. So, one team left for Aracode on Wednesday and the other, to Sathyamangalam, on Thursday. Both were able to get a glimpse of their landscape and run/ explore their tool of research in a very minimal pilot mode. While the experience was very useful, the pandemic spread in India forced us all to return back on Saturday. It was deemed safer to send the students back home as the district, state and country was slowly planning on a process of shutdown and border closures would become an issue. In field, Sowmya got to shadow the health workers in Garkiyoor as she tried to understand the social and other systems in place, with respect to healthcare. In Hasanur, Visithra and Anupriya tried out a pilot survey of about 10 people with the survey form used by the earlier NFLC students. Now into the lockdown, we wait as we plan and figure out how to continue a new model of study for NFLC in these strange times of the corona.
