Today's work

Several months later : so much for good intentions! And so much for easy fieldwork. I now have two weeks left of my Arusha fieldwork before heading off to Lusaka for Christmas and then to Kigoma, my other research site in Tanzania. And it's been anything but easy! Though with regards to my previous post, none of the discomfort has been in any way connected to self-sacrifice to help the natives / save my soul / subjecting myself to the endless suffering that is Africa.

Anyway. More on ups and downs later.

But here’s what I did today. Got up at 6:30 to light the little paraffin contraption behind my one-room house, for 10 seconds of tepid water 45 minutes later. Then at 0800 I followed the path through the forest to the main road, where I caught a dalla-dalla bus to Tengeru, the town where I was to meet my assistant.

Ok, I didn’t. I'm lying! No longer can I claim to be part of the dalla-dalla crowd! Last week I finally gave in to the 2 months’ hype about how dangerous that walk is, and started calling Max, my local taxi driver. So today I just crossed the river and walked over to the dirt road where he picked me up. Max is a skinny guy in stonewashed jeans, driving a cobweb-stickered dark-windows cab by day, and breaking hearts with his Bongo Flava crooning by night. And on Sundays he turns up in pastel suits, ready for his afternoon church service. I am his ‘sister’ and so he only charges me $5 for the 20-minute ride. Hrmph.

I met my assistant JK at our usual hang-out, a hedged-in dirt patch with some trees and plastic furniture in it. At one end there is a cement cubicle structure with a woman, a sink and a microwave in it, as well as a bougainvillea-covered shade roof over some soda fridges standing in the dirt. In other words, a fully equipped roadside café where the local middle class meets.

We met to go through some transcription issues and to plan next week’s focus groups. I’ve only covered one of my two topics so far, and we need to go back to the same places with my second one. Actually we should have done this last week, but then one of JK’s previous employers, an economic historian from Lund University, turned up, and asked to ‘borrow’ him for a few days. So now we have nine days for 17 focus groups in 8 villages. Should be ok though. We discussed a little whether we should use the same groups, or new ones. Some have been chosen by the Village Chairman, others were more random, some were, as JK puts it, trying to paint a rosy picture of their village, and others were looking for money. And then other groups seemed to just genuinely enjoy the opportunity of being able to discuss things. At one place, people kept trickling in to the discussion room and joining in with such spontaneity and apparent earnestness that we couldn’t ask them to leave – especially as they were all old men of 50+. Afterwards they didn’t ask for money but asked us to come back since they had more to say on the subject, and had never realised how important it was to discuss this. So we’ll be asking to speak with those men again, but in 3 instalments.

JK had a list of most of the ‘mwenyekiti’s and ‘mtendaji’s as the village officers are called, but the two most remote ones were missing. So we drove to the villages to make the arrangements in person. At the first village we met the chairman immediately – a skinny guy with a wide smile. At the next village, the office was closed, and no cellphone number posted on the door. The woman in the shop next door said they had gone to a district-level meeting, but the sub-village chairman would have the number. He was at a church further down the road.

So we walked a few hundred metres until we heard the church. That is, we heard the praying. JK smiled. We walked down the path though the greenery, and a white-painted plank building with no windows and a closed door appeared on a green green lawn, surrounded by haphazard flowers. A man was shouting inside, loud and fast, with melodrama. We stood on the lawn. Ten minutes passed. JK excused himself and came back. Another ten minutes passed. I excused myself and came back. After half an hour I asked:
H-Is it common here, to have church services in the middle of a weekday?
JK (smiling) – This is a pentecostal church. They don’t like to follow fixed.. you know, procedures. They just do it anyhow.
So I start asking him about Pentecostalism. It’s growing here, he says, among the illiterate and the poor. And they don’t even teach them things to help themselves! Some young semi-literate men, they go to the US, they come back with some things to say, and after a while you see them with a big car, with money… And these people who go to the church, they are poor! I don’t even know if they believe.. but there is the funding, maybe they think if I start going to this church, I can get some clothes, some aid. But if they could learn how to work hard, they would not be depending on the pastor. Sometimes they call people to spend a whole day inside the church – how can you work if you are spending the days in there?
So that’s why Pentecostalism is spreading, he says. The Americans are trying to take over the world with their Amreican Christianity. Making people dependent. He tells of people who refused to go to the doctor with their malaria, but died in church instead. Yesterday, whilst walking along the river interviewing farmers for the Swedish researcher’s milk project, he asked a woman whose stock had dwindled where she took her cows for (free) veterinary service. She didn’t, she said: she just prayed instead. ‘Somehow these areas which have our European Christianity, they are doing ok – but where these new American churches come in – people don’t manage so well.’

The voice from the church showed no signs of abating so we walked back onto the road where we met some people and explained our situation. No point waiting if he’s in the church, they said, but we’ll send this kid with you to show the way to the chairman’s house. We took the car (a well-worn Peugeot belonging to JK’s relative) and this dusty, raggedy-clothed 7-year old had clearly never been in a car before – his eyes lit up and he smiled all the way there. That, and the weight of the mission he’d been entrusted with, made it difficult even to tell me his name when I asked. Solomon.

Anyway. We managed to make all the arrangements in the end. Then on the way back, a Danish woman I met at a ‘julefrokost’ party at a friend’s last week called and asked if she could interview me tomorrow. She’s a journalist with one of the big paper in Denmark. The interview is not about me, but about feminism – but still, I REALLY hope I don’t say anything stupid!