A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions (Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.) - Part II

Christa, Jessica, Federico and Ayaka are ETH students who participated in a two-week field project to Arba Minch, situated in the Gamo Gofa zone in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People’s Region (SNNPR) in Ethiopia from 16 November to 1 December 2019. In this post, they share some stories of conducting fieldwork in an international setting.

Read more about the class in the first post of this series.

Team work (by Christa Hirschvogel)

Photo: Lara Lamberts-Van Assche

This picture was taken during an interview session. Apart from Lara, who was taking the picture, our team is complete. The man on the right is the land owner and respondent. We are on his property in the centre of the village. Conducting the surveys took a lot of time and challenged us in many ways because we were faced with multi-layered problems due to cultural diversity. But the real reason I chose this picture is that for me it symbolizes our team work. The sense of community and our own function within a team are often decisive to move forward. The dynamics in our team changed strongly depending on whose strengths were in demand. Every member contributed differently and every part was important to reach our objective. The inhabitants of the village of Chano, where we were welcomed for a week, also relies on the sense of community and the security it provides, as this is the only way to achieve certain goals.

Field work (by Jessica Gearing)

Photo: Jessica Gearing

This photo is a great representation of our time in the village of Chano. In the background you can see the beautiful landscape that we were surrounded by during out time in Ethiopia and in the foreground, you can see the majority of team Chano. This picture was taken the morning of our third day in the village and shows our team carrying our equipment and following a farmer - who we had previously interviewed - to his maize farm. This was the first time carrying out the qualitative surveys and applying the methodologies we had learnt in class, to a practical situation. I myself feel that this was a day when I learnt an immense amount of what it’s like to carry out field work and be part of a team. We all learnt how to most efficiently carry out the field methods to achieve an answer to our research questions, as well as finding out what all our strengths and weaknesses were. Not only did we learn technical skills, but we also were able to immerse ourselves in a new culture and learn new customs and traditions.

Becoming friends (Federico Ferrari)

Photo: Federico Ferrari

During our stay in the village of Gerese, we conducted many quantitative interviews with local farmers and households to assess the status of their food and energy security and their livelihood strategies. This was only possible, because of obvious linguistic and cultural barriers, thanks to the support of or fellow Ethiopian group mates. Of course, and with more time spent together it became more and more evident, what every student was able to bring to the project was not limited to that. Two students from Belgium, three form Ethiopia and two from Switzerland, with different backgrounds and from different walks of life. Our paths would otherwise never have crossed; and still we were able together to accomplish an everything but trivial task over the two weeks we spent together, each contributing with his own expertise to the project, and what I think was really the highlight of the field trip, to end the two weeks, being able to call each other a friend.

Challenges with interviews (by Ayaka Gütlin)

Photo: Ayaka Gütlin

This was one of the farms where we had a difficult qualitative interview. The first time we came by we just did a short interview, with the male owner of the household. Everything seemed very well and we felt welcome. The next time we went there was to ask for a longer interview, we were welcomed to have an interview with the mother of the household male. All our interviews had to be translated by the students from Ethiopia, which sometimes made things difficult, since it went through another person’s tongue. At some point we realized that the happy mood we had before was gone and that we could feel tension rising between the Ethiopian students and the woman we interviewed. In the end I was feeling a bit insecure and bad about the interview, because we realized that we were doing things the lady did not like. This was a very important lesson because even though we come in good will, it does not always have to be taken like that. It might sound naive but through that (and also other situations) I have realized even more that working with people especially in terms of different nationalities and language barriers is very challenging. How do I turn difficult situations into good ones, how can I make the people feel comfortable and create a good mood to be able to answer the questions I wanted to answer and how legitimate is the work that I am doing? These kinds of questions, which guide us through this kind of work, enabled me to realize the essence of sustainable and also developmental and scientific work and a lesson which I would not have been able to get if I did not join the course. Thank you for giving us this opportunity and the privilege to join this course.

We are grateful for the financial support by the WFSC (Course Support Grant for WFSC members) to the field projects in 2019 (Ethiopia), 2018 (Kenya) and 2017 (Ethiopia).