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.