The field portion was
amazing, and gave me a more realistic idea of what it is like to conduct
Anthropological research. We stayed in a campsite about three miles away from
the gates of Tarangire National Park, and about a mile away from a tiny town
called Olasiti. There were six students doing Biology projects, four doing
Archaeology projects, and the remaining ten of us did Cultural Anthropology
projects. Every day the Biology and Archaeology folks would take the cars to
the game park or the Archaeology site, and they would usually go twice a day,
once in the morning and once in the evening. It was way too hot between the
hours of 11-4 pm to do anything, so during that time we would usually attempt
to sleep, play cards, read or just sit there and sweat. There were five translators
living with us, all of who are Maasai and speak Maa, Swahili and English to
help the cultural students with our projects. Only a few of the translators
wore their traditional Maasai clothes, and most of them have moved away from
their home villages, but they were important cultural brokers in our
interactions with the Maasai community. All of us got really close with the
translators, drivers and kitchen staff, and some of my favorite times at the
campsite were hanging out with the translators, doing dishes or helping prepare
dinner in the kitchen. Even though most of the staff spoke English, it was a
good opportunity to practice some Swahili (although I am still not fluent by
any means).
My
research project was on comparing traditional Maasai education to the formal
education at the local government schools in and around Olasiti. I conducted
several participant observation sessions at the local primary school, spoke
with teachers at both the local primary and secondary school, and did
interviews with Maasai elders and parents in Olasiti and another village called
Oltuki. I really enjoyed going to the schools and it was very interesting for
me to see how the classrooms work and what teacher-student interactions look
like. The teaching style is heavily based on call-response and repetition, and
I never saw any students asking questions. I watched Swahili, English, and math
classes, and once a friend and I got to teach one of the English classes (which
meant writing things on the board and then checking the answers in the
students’ notebooks). The educational system is still a bit confusing to me,
but I definitely learned a lot during the short time I visited the schools. The
interviewing process was a bit of a wild goose chase. There was limited access
to the translators and we never created any kind of schedule, so I just leaped
at any interviewing opportunity that came my way. I was able to conduct about
18 interviews, including my interviews with teachers. Sometimes interviews could
be stressful and frustrating. Often participants wouldn’t show up at the time
you had scheduled an interview, and people were often busy, especially the men.
We compensated our participants with a box of tea and a kilo of sugar, but sometimes
they would get angry and ask us for money. Most of the community members in
Olasiti were welcoming, but we would frequently be asked tough questions like
“why are you here? How will your research help us?”. It was difficult to answer
questions like that because the reality is that our research won’t really help
them, despite our best intentions. I really enjoyed wandering around from boma
to boma with the translators looking for participants, and I got to see a lot
of cute babies and goats in the process. I audio-recorded the interviews, and
in my downtime at the campsite I transcribed them by hand to try to see if I
could find any trends in my data. Transcribing was tedious. Sometimes it was
difficult to understand the translator, and the background noise of goats, cows
and children drowned out our voices. However I think the transcriptions will be
valuable during my analysis, and it was a good way to stay focused on my topic.
A lot of us encountered the same obstacles during our research, and it was helpful
having each other and our director to find different ways to approach various
issues. I could keep going on the research aspect, but I think I have covered
the main ideas. I learned a lot, mostly about the research process than my
actual topic. The last day we gave a presentation to the community members, and
in the true Tanzanian fashion we started two hours late, and the presentation
was about five hours long.
When
we weren’t out at the park, arch site, or doing interviews, we had a lot of
time to hang out at the campsite. The cultural anthro people had interviews to
transcribe, but that would only keep us occupied for so long. Strangely enough
I never got bored, although some days I would accomplish absolutely nothing.
Even when we wouldn’t leave the campsite, herds of goats would raid our tents,
and Maasai children would stick their heads over the walls and yell “HELLO
HELLO HELLO! Give me pen! Give me chocolate! What is your name? HELLO!” several
times a day, every single day. I would go for runs in the mornings before
breakfast or in the evenings, and almost every time I would get mobbed by
groups of children who would grab my hands and run with me until they were
tired. At first I sort of dreaded the child-attack, but after a while I grew
quite fond of them. Also in the evenings we would do a Jillian Michaels (she is
on the Biggest Loser for those of you who are not familiar) workout video, and
we always had an audience of several children and an old babu who would watch
us over the wall. It was pretty hilarious. We decided that they probably
thought that we were doing a choreographed dance, because that is way less
absurd than what we were actually doing. Other past-times were walking into
town for a soda or snack, making friendship bracelets, and we gave each other
haircuts using child craft scissors. The last few days we found and adopted
four adorable and probably diseased puppies, so that kept us entertained as
well. In the evenings after dinner each of us had the opportunity to tell his
or her life story for about 1-2 hours, while the rest of us sat under the stars
and listened. It was interesting hearing the experiences of people with whom I
lived in such close contact. It
was also a good exercise telling my own life story and thinking about what
parts are important and worth sharing. Other than that we didn’t do too much.
We rose and fell with the sun, and did our best not to annoy each other.
There were two special
events that occurred during our time in the field. The first was Halloween. There
was a bit of drama over the proposition of buying and slaughtering a goat at
the campsite in order to include the Tanzanian staff in our celebration.
Another girl and I felt uncomfortable with the goat situation, and when we
raised our concern our group had a very long discussion deciding whether or not
we should buy the goat. More than half of our group is vegetarian,
incidentally, but only three of us (against 18) had an emotional response to
the idea of killing a goat at our campsite. In the end we decided not to buy
the goat, and I think the conversation we had about it was important for all of
us. Instead we created makeshift costumes out of the resources we had, and ate
a lot of candy. I was a dust devil (they are everywhere), and I was very
impressed with the costumes that people threw together. The other major event
was the election. That was probably the highlight of my time at Tarangire. The
morning after the election we found out that Obama had won, and we took the day
off to celebrate. Actually, we couldn’t do any research because the cars had no
gas, so we used that as our excuse. We went into town for some celebratory
sodas, got to watch some CNN at one of the bars, and then after lunch we had a
piñata. The piñata was a paper mache giraffe that we had made for Halloween,
and the staff got to demolish it using a cow femur we found. It was so much fun
and I took several videos of people taking turns trying to take down the
piñata. That night we all went out to dinner at a restaurant in town, in order
to celebrate Obama’s victory, and to show our gratitude to the staff. We made
thank you cards for all of them, and had a blast eating and dancing together.
It was really sad to say goodbye to the translators when we left Tarangire, but
we made sure to friend them on Facebook.
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