breaking and entering

I got my first SMS with the word ‘burglars’ in it the other day. Unfortunately, it was used in reference to some folks who stopped by my house on Sunday night. Fortunately, no one was home at the time but the cat (and I think she’s still a little freaked out). One of the two wooden doors through which you can get into our place was hacked apart with a panga (not to be overly dramatic, but it’s a large machete-type knife) and an undetermined number of ‘burglars’ crawled in thru what was left of the door and started going through our stuff. They didn’t find much. This is of course because we don’t have much. They riffled through everything in the cabinet under the TV, and went thru my housemate’s closet, and made a mess. But it doesn’t appear that they managed to take a whole lot of anything. They left a laptop, for example, but took a pair of tennis shoes. I think what happened was that a friend of mine, who was staying in the house while my housemate and I were away, drove up not too long after they got in and the sight of her headlights scared them off.

The reason they got in, though, was because my friend didn’t lock the metal gate over the outside of the wooden door. This is both disturbing and reassuring – the latter because it indicates that the place is otherwise hard to get into, but the former because it makes it feel like someone was watching for an opportunity, and/or hanging around a lot. The house was broken into several times last year before I arrived, but not since. The weirdest part of this one was that my room was completely untouched. There was a camera on the shelf in my closet, jewelry in the drawer next to the bed, shoes, clothes, a few CDs. But it appears they never even went into my room. It looks like someone ripped a small hold in the cardboard that covers up the broken glass in one of my windows and pulled out a small blue nylon bag with a few CDs in it, but even that they left in my housemate’s room down the hall.

On finding the door hacked open, my friend called the local 911. This is where the story gets strange. The Maun police are not known for being terribly responsive or competent. So the local expat community – read, whites – have established their own little group of enforcers. To ‘subscribe’, you just get a walkie-talkie. To get help, you use it to say someone’s in your house. Et voila, the cavalry arrives. In this case, my friend says, within a minute or two three men showed up at our place, one screaming “YOU BASTARDS!!!!” and going through the house with a handgun tucked into the front of his pants and wielding a shotgun with a flashlight taped to it. This image makes me almost as uncomfortable as the idea of someone breaking in in the first place.

Maun used to be a village. Now it’s teeming with tourists, who have enabled walls to be built between the wealth they bring and the people who resided in the area ‘before.’ This breeds resentment. It feeds anger and frustration. White foreigners come in and set up businesses for other white foreigners, constructing turquoise pools under razor wire walls and driving air-conditioned Land Cruisers past mud-and thatch huts while hobbled donkeys limp and graze in the center of town. And yet, we are the ones who feel affronted. We are the ones who arm ourselves and express our rage that THEY would try to take something from us. The first time my housemate was robbed – before I arrived – the thief took milk from the pantry. Someone broke into the house and stole MILK. Not the laptop that was sitting on the sofa, but MILK.

Even though she left the gate unlocked, my friend says she doesn’t think it’s her fault that ‘they’ broke in. By this I think she means that she shouldn’t have to lock the door. Fair enough. In an ideal world, no one would ever have to lock anything. But I can’t sort out the logic that inflates the bubble of the white community in Maun. People come here, a friend of mine says, because they can do whatever they want. Hearing stories about pilots ramming around in the Delta and overturning boats in the middle of the night, I suspect there is a great deal of truth in his observation. But I want to go one step further. I think it’s because we think we have a RIGHT to do whatever we want, and with no responsibility to anyone but ourselves.

In the end, having someone break into your house is scary – regardless of whether you are there or not, and regardless of the larger political context in which it takes place. Stuff is just stuff. My friend can go out and buy a new pair of shoes. But I can’t just go out and pick up a new sense of security. The 911 subscribers say that crime has really been escalating of late, and I guess they would know. As for me, I think Maun is built on inequalities which have real consequences for everyone – whether they admit it or not. Maybe taking so freely isn’t free in the end, and maybe privilege can’t help you sleep at night. I guess I’ll be testing that one out in the days ahead.

bush school

I spent the last three weeks up in the Botswana-Namibia border area working with students, faculty, and locally-based conservation practitioners from Africa and the US. I’ve been working with other faculty members on setting up this programme for some time, so it was really nice to finally get everyone here and go out and do something. We’re trying to find ways to make sure that research done here is actually useful, rather than an abstract inquiry into what someone from across the ocean thinks is interesting. And we’re also trying to benefit people who live here with training and opportunities that are sometimes hard to come by. By conducting interdisciplinary research with a team of people ranging from conservation outreach workers to students and professors, we’re also hoping to socialize students from abroad in a way that will make it natural for them to go about their work in locally meaningful, respectful, participatory ways.

So, I had some teaching to do. I talked a lot about being sensitive to local culture and expectations about appropriate behavior. I told our female students they needed to wear skirts when they go to the village. I got really tired of the term ‘instrument’ being applied to research strategies, as if a questionnaire was going be used to slice a person open like a scalpel. And given the prevalence of HIV in the area where we were working, I told a group of students that I didn’t see any conceivable way for them to walk into the home of someone they didn’t know and ask, “Has anyone in your household died in the past year?” Stigmatization being what is it, I said, they will assume you mean AIDS. But that’s not what WE mean, one student argued. Doesn’t matter, I said. You won’t be the one interpreting your questions. You only get to ask them.

But I also did a lot of learning. I thought about how different my graduate education must have been in comparison to the one at the University of Florida from which most of the students were coming. I wondered where along the line the idea that living in another country and being, as my advisor told me, ‘interested in everything’, got lost in a sea of GPS measurements and survey forms. I was reminded that practicing what I preach about taking your time and getting to know another way of life is not something that’s ever easy, or finished. And while I thought that playing a soccer game with one of the nearby (all male) teams was a great community-building idea, I didn’t realize it could also stretch local ideas about who is an athlete. Several of our best players, you see, were women – and when the game was over, women from the village crowded around them with congratulations and excitement (even though we got waxed).

By the way, Michael (and other Badgers :-), if you’re out there reading this, one of the grad students made a comment the other day that I thought would make you laugh hysterically. We were arranging meeting times to talk about specifics of conducting fieldwork, and one of the students piped up, “If ‘Rachel’ is synonymous with ‘methods’, then we really need some more time with her before she goes.” Me, a methods expert. Imagine.