Mt Meru from the road in to Arusha

Fieldwork in Tanzania...

...seems to conjure up images of some self-sacrificing batik-clad shiny-faced me slaving away amidst the dirt and endless suffering that is Africa. All for the sake of this whitey tradition of helping the natives and saving one's own soul / karma / sense of perspective whilst at it.

Whilst I'm here in Tanzania doing my PhD fieldwork, I won't be trying to live up to that idea. Or down to it, for that matter.

Partly that's due to my current iconoclastic mood on the topic, but also the happy fact that I'm an incredibly spoiled researcher. For example: the trip from Nairobi to Arusha is usually made with the Impala Shuttle Service - an optimistic name for a ramshackle collection of secondhand Korean minibuses that cram passengers into the aisles for a half-day drive with no toilets. Me? I take Mom's Shuttle Service. When she had the car and she had the T-shirt, why should her daughter have to take anthing but Mom's personal Shuttle Service to her research site? Of course on the way she also picked up her other daughter from HER research site, so she could go home to the US and write up her thesis.