Question: What would you say is your favourite thing about your fieldwork?

Anouk Gouvras answered on 15 Jun 2012:

Good question emilyrosedeal.

I think my favourite thing has to be visiting the villages and working with the local teams. It is always a new experience, even when I return to the same village and/or work with the same team. These villages are so basic, the people live on what they make each day and yet they are always kind and generous. They make an effort to make me feel welcome. They teach me about how they do things in their village. A few times in certain villages they have prepared meals in my honor (and you can not be picky about the food when it is prepared this way for you! That would be rude. So although I am lactose intolerant, I had to drink the weird sour milk broth they gave me, act like I enjoyed it, and then moan and groan privately in my room). In one village I was asked to bless a couple of babies. In another they taught me how to grind millet using the large stone mortars and wooden pestles. In a village in Niger I learnt that the moment it starts raining everybody stops what they are doing, even school and rushes out with buckets, saucepans, bins anything that can collect water, and places them underneath corners of all the roofs so that the water running off the roofs will be collected. (Niger has suffered three years of failed rains and drought, water is very precious!).

And talking to the teams is great, they have had a very different up bringing compared to me and its always interesting to compare notes, discuss things and also have fun. In Kenya and Niger they bought a goat, killed it and roasted it over a fire. In Tanzania we had to use a ferry to cross Lake Victoria and got stuck at the port overnight once when the ferry broke down. In Kenya we also spent a night in Tsavo national park, the team and I rented a little lodge next to an animal watering hole and we spent the evening on the balcony, eating sandwiches and drinking kenyan tea, watching first buffalo, then elephants, then a antelope and also a leopard come and visit the water-hole through out the night. It was great. Till one of the guys started telling em scary stories about people being killed by leopards and I got quite scared.
I have had great experiences in Kenya, Tanzania and Niger with the teams.

And each time I travel by myself to these remote places, I learn something about myself too. Sometimes its good, sometimes its bad (I learnt that I become very impatient and ungrateful when I’m tired) but it gives me chance to think and accept. Which back at home due to all the activities, work, family, friends, etc I don’t really have time to think like that.