Perfect ‘Disaster’ in HUMI-Suva’s 1st Data Collection

So finally we did it! We started collecting soil from around Suva. Mark the date because it was the 22nd of February. As I said to the students at the time, whatever we felt about the actual trip, the actual event was the first of a project that would last a minimum of five years but most likely a project that is projected to go for 35 years!

I got mostly blank looks.

Everyone wanted to go back to school / home. It was a ‘disaster‘ – from start to finish.

• It was hot and humid (in the Southern Hemisphere of course this is our summer).
• The first location we chose was full of mosquitoes and we didn’t think to bring anti-mozzie spray.
• The location looked great when we first went there but in actual fact although it was a lovely residential area’s cul de sac, it was a rubbish tipping ground.
• The end of the cul de sac had more greenery on it but actually it wasn’t realised that it was on the edge of a steep gully. Impossible to collect soil from here as well as being dangerous.
• Most of the ground seemed to be full of construction material, ie hard to dig down into soil.
• We didn’t have a nice bucket or big enough plastic bag to collect the soil.
• We forgot to bring a sieve; a weighing scale, thermometer, or even a pen to record the site data on the poorly designed data sheet attached to the clipboard (luckily we scrounged one from a bag that someone was carrying).
• We didn’t have a cool box within which to store the soil immediately after extracting it.
• The drone remote control software was deleted from my phone and had to be downloaded again – not easy when you’re on a 3G network.
• The drone remote control wouldn’t connect to the mobile device so it was hard to control.
• I forgot how to actually take a video on the drone, so only photographs.
• The pictures I took with the drone were blown out.
• The 360 camera was forgotten to be taken even though it was on our list to thing to take.
• We ran way over time, we were all late to our next school event.

In all likelihood the sample is not useable because of our clumsiness.

BUT actually it was perfect!

Why?

Well because of course we know what we did wrong and we have already done our second session this week which went remarkably smoothly compared to the first session. THIS is the point about doing this kind of work with school students. It’s the learning that take place that is the real ‘gold‘. That is not to say that we’re aiming to fail, or that the data sampling is not important, or that we strive to make mistakes so that we can learn from them. However, the fact is that we get to do this sample again and again for at least 20 locations. Each time we get to refine our practice more and more.

Currently we’ve got a 90 minute block to collect from one sample site. We can easily see how we are going to get much better at this and start collecting from two sites in the same time frame with zero mistakes and none of the discomfort that we’re currently experiencing.

We will keep our current two soil samples but we can also see ourselves going back to the same sites that we originally do and then collect the soil again and note that differences might be due to our increasing expertise in collecting soil, rather than external factors.