A Place To Put Such Things.

Ok, you bastards, you got me. After years spent adamantly resisting any urge to dip my toe into the blogosphere, I've decided to shut my eyes, clench my fists and jump bodily into the … well, if not the 21st century, at least the mid-1990s. I have found myself, not for the first time, in a situation where I just keep thinking 'you know, this would really be a blog entry if I had anywhere to put such things.' So here I am, finally expending the activation energy to begin what will, I hope, become a self-sustaining process. At this rate, I should be actively using Twitter by 2016.

So. Here is the situation in which I find myself. I am in Ghana! Fieldwork. Research. The important features of this will become clear if and when they become interesting. The relevant facts for the time being are: I have been here for three weeks, I have another six to go, and also this: in previous experience, I hate fieldwork. Hate. It.

You guys! This is the dramatic tension! What is this trip going to be like? Is it going to be scary and depressing and painful like getting punched in the face by your mom? Or is it going to be a fantastical adventure in faraway lands like joining the crew of a pirate ship with your mom? There's only one immediately obvious way for you to find out.

(By the way, Mom, I do not mean to accuse you of assault, much less of leading a secret life of swashbuckling and thievery on the high seas. Thanks for reading my blog!)

I Should Get You Caught Up.

I arrived in Ghana on Sunday the 26th of July, and my first 11 days in the country were spent in Accra at the Hotel President (not as luxurious as it sounds) making contacts, watching African TV and getting pretty good at spider solitaire. I wrote an entry about this at devstuds.blogspot.com, the group fieldwork blog for Development Studies at Oxford. Here is what I wrote to my classmates:

So, I am officially on day 3 in real live honest-to-god actual Ghana. I've been spending my time so far dealing with what most of you are dealing with - finding a place to sleep, figuring out how to change money on a Sunday, trying to understand the rules of haggling and tipping, and taking utterly terrifying taxi rides - and later this week I have my first Ministry of Health meeting which in theory will be the first step toward my running a bunch of focus groups next week in a village way off to the east. By myself. Which I still find hilarious.

When I was in JFK airport catching my connecting flight to Accra, I spoke on the phone to a friend who just (quite to her own surprise) found herself accepted to business school. She'll be starting in autumn. "I feel like the universe really called my bluff on this one," she said.

Indeed.

After getting some sleep on my flight, I woke up and watched the path of the plane on my little display screen until landing, and any encroaching sense of panic I had was mitigated by looking at that map and seeing how I was flying just over the heads of Kerrie and Ganle and stopping just short of Georgie and a bit south of Chloe, and this is not to get all misty-eyed or anything; it is more to point and laugh and say ha! you suckers are all in the same boat with me!

Best of luck and keep up the pokerface
Ryan

Update: Nothing has changed. I am still bluffing. However after Accra I traveled to the municipality of Keta, where I will be doing the bulk of my actual fieldwork at the district hospital in a town called, charmingly enough, Dzelukope. Jel-OO-ko-FWAY. Yep!

Keta Day 1 – August 6.

It is at certain moments in my life, like the one in which I am offered a shot of gin in the backyard of an Ewe chief at 9 in the morning, that I find myself thinking 'Well, I don't know what I expected my life to be like, but it wasn't this.'

'African wakeup,' the chief says to me, grinning.

In fairness, it's not a full shot that they give me. They're taking full shots themselves, but out of deference, I guess, for my presumed limited ability to drink hard liquor before breakfast, what they give me is really just a sip, but I still manage to kind of gag on it and end up with gin in my lungs. So even when I am presumed incompetent, I exceed expectations.

I am staying in a kind of semidetached bungalow on a compound owned by Fred, the contact in Keta I got from Alex, the contact at the Ministry of Health I got from Dennis, the contact at the NGO I got from Kataneh, the contact at my old job. I am always kind of amazed by how networking works. The compound was completely flooded by a heavier than usual rainy season. The rains stopped the day before Barack Obama arrived in the country last month. Which seems about right.

Because of the flooding, the compound has had to be completely repainted and refurbished. I try to help the men move furniture, and when it quickly becomes apparent that I'm getting in the way, I help the children move buckets of sand instead. Six years ago in Mizque, Bolivia, I helped out on a farm for about ten seconds before the men decided it would be better for me to go inside and help the women and children make biscuits. When there is masculine physical labor to be done, I seem to pretty often fall into the category of 'women/children/exempt' without meaning to. I would like to blame this on the clueless foreigner thing, but let's be honest, it happens at home too.

I learned today that because I was born on a Sunday, my name is Korshie. I start introducing myself as such, consistently to howls of laughter. This is what anthropologists call 'building rapport,' and in my case seems to usually involve letting people laugh at me.

Keta Day 2 – August 7.

Went to the hospital today and got the full tour. The hospital administrator and I had a talk about data collection methodology that made me feel like this is going to work out just fine. I am also learning a few words of Ewe – not enough to be useful for communication, but enough to be useful for breeding goodwill.

There are moments when I feel isolated and stir-crazy and when I wish there weren't ants and sand on every surface of everything I own, but at these moments I tell myself 'Unclench, jerk. You're having an adventure.' And that seems to usually sort it out.

Keta Day 3 – August 8

I find myself saying 'mm' a lot in response to what people say to me. It's kind of like an 'oh' and kind of like a 'yes' without a lot of yes in it. It seems like a safe thing to say.

I went to the beach today and almost lost a sandal, but it washed back on shore a minute later. I watched crabs running around and helped some fishermen push their boat into the water. Into the Gulf of Guinea.

Not bad, Ghana. Not bad.

Keta Day 4 – August 9

Dear Ewe villagers: If you thought it was funny when I told you my name was Korshie, just wait until I show up at church in a chiefly kente shirt. Pure comedy gold, apparently.

Looking mildly uncomfortable to have my photo taken after not having seen a mirror in a week.

Fred asked the preacher (umm... Presbyter? Pastor? Vicar?) to do part of the sermon in English for my benefit, but he decided it would be better to pull me outside and witness to me directly while the congregation sang hymns. So we sat in white plastic chairs under a tree and he asked me if I believed that Jesus came down from heaven to save us all. ('The Jews don't believe,' he explained to me). The next time somebody asks me this question, I've got to remember to lie. Instead I told him I don't know. Well I don't! I was diplomatic enough not to add 'but I think probably he didn't.' Still, the preacher was pretty dissatisfied with my answer and now he wants to come see me at the hospital to discuss the matter further. Which is neat.

Keta Day 5 - August 10. Day 1 of Data Collection Rhymes With Blustertruck.

So I was reading H. Russell Bernard's Research Methods in Anthropology yesterday (which is as useful for making last-minute changes to your research plan as it is for killing cockroaches, which is very), and he says you should always ALWAYS plan to pretest your questionnaires because there is inevitably going to be something stupid about them that you didn't realize would screw everything up. So I thought, well, I think this questionnaire will be fine, but we'll see how it goes today and maybe make some changes if any issues come up. And I used it today and I didn't make any changes afterward. I didn't make any changes because the questionnaire is completely irreparably useless from beginning to end.

Basically, things get off to a bad start when I can't for the life of me convince the nurses that what I want is to survey every fourth patient who comes in. Despite repeated explanations, the nurse helping me (we will call her 'Clementine') consistently sends in each and every patient because she is either trying to be helpful or just trying to screw up my day so that I leave and she doesn't have to help me anymore. The latter would be kind of excusable, because she's actually the night nurse, and the staff shortage means that at 10am she's still here to ruin my survey.

But the sampling problems are kind of immaterial because it turns out that of all the pregnant women coming in for antenatal, nobody speaks English and most are also illiterate. I had actually anticipated this, asked about it, and been assured that it was not the case, but so it goes. The fact is I don't have an Ewe version of the survey so Clementine has to translate for me on the fly, and I have no idea what she is saying to the patients but she is definitely conversing more than necessary. At one point I can tell she is arguing with a patient and making her change her answer. Awesome, Clem. If this wasn't bad enough, there's this moment about a half hour in:

Clementine and patient chatting in Ewe
Clementine: She says yes. She knows where to go.
Ryan: Wait. The question is does she have a PROBLEM knowing where to go.
Clementine: Oh. Right. So the answer is no.
Ryan: ...

How long had we been reversing the yeses and nos? No way to be sure. So... there goes the last shred of legitimacy in what was already some pretty unusable data. Making day one of data collection a complete

and unmitigated

failure.

These things happen. And I feel better after getting my first internet time in about a week and speaking to Alex at the Ministry of Health, who basically fixes everything and gives me some advice that will allow me to do some actual useful work with the rest of my week.

Sadly, I am running low on is reading material. After having spent over a year reading Tristram Shandy, I'm blowing through the remainder at a pretty breakneck pace. After that all that's left is the Lonely Planet guide to West Africa and a bunch of books that are no fun to read because they're relevant to my work.

Keta Day 6 – August 11.

I'm taking mefloquine to prevent malaria, and while I don't get the psychotic episodes or hallucinations that some people experience as side effects, I do get the weird vivid dreams. Last night I dreamed

a) that my dear friend Zoe, while in India, had started dating Ed Asner, the announcer on the Tonight Show, who was about 50 years her senior. Apparently they met while taking a Hindi class together. Please note that Ed Asner is real, but he is not the announcer of the Tonight Show. He is an entirely different famous old person. The announcer on the Tonight Show is somebody else. Probably Don Pardo.

b) that I was recording a song I had written, to which the first two lines were

Well I took a Train to Tulsa
Starry Oklahoma

This was sung roughly to the tune of 'Why Don't Women Like Me,' which like Ed Asner is real and not my invention. I don't know how the rest of my version went though because after the first two lines my alarm went off.

A few nights ago I dreamed that I had a cookie jar that made a sound like a rooster when you lifted the lid, and that this was THE KEY to sorting out all my research problems. Even while dreaming that one, I was thinking 'Oh come on. A rooster? I'm just dreaming this because of the stupid roosters outside my window.'

Well look, you're not caught up yet, but I think I'm abusing the conventions of the medium by making such a lengthy post. Which is high-falutin' for 'I'm tired of typing.' So I'll fill in the rest at a later time.