I think I alluded to it in an earlier post, but the day before I was set to go for my two last days of fieldwork, things just turned upside down with Elli’s laboratory things and our payments and everything worked out in the end, but not without me being half a day late to my first feedback session, and then it just kind of continued in the same manner from there. The feedback sessions went well enough, but I felt so stressed all the time that I couldn’t be properly present.
We spent the night at a moldy, overpriced hotel in Kaya, Elli and I playing around with fruit and laughing a bit in our exhaustion. But then, neither of us could settle down and it became a sleepless night for both of us.
So, next morning, possible due to tiredness, we got behind schedule already in the first village and the feeling of stress took over me again. Coming back to Zanzi was lovely, talking to the old man and his fellow villagers, and maybe I was about to find my way back to the ground again, calming down despite still being behind schedule – but then, suddenly, there was a buzzing noise, and the women under the tree picked up their children and ran away.
And then they were over me. The wasps. An entire swarm. One in each ear, in my hair, on my face. I don’t know what came first, if the wasps were already there when I stood up and started running, or if my running attracted more of them. It was just so chaotic around me, people scattering everywhere, running, and I had a wasp in each ear, it was disorienting and I tried to get them out, panic, thinking: what if they sting and it turns me deaf. I couldn’t keep my balance, I fell and ripped up my knee and then a young man grabbed my hand and pulled me with him into a hut, where he started arguing with a woman who was sitting on the floor with a baby in her lap, while at the same time helping me to get wasps out of my hair. There were at least three.
He then quickly took me to the car and almost pushed me into it, slamming the door shut behind me. I wasn’t aware of what was happening, until we were already driving away from there. Without a proper goodbye, or my pen. I found a last wasp in my hair, though, at the base of my braid still crawling around. I killed it.
Luckily, Elli had managed to pick up my notebook, which I had dropped when I fell. The feedback session had also basically been done, and we were only sharing pleasantries when the wasps attacked, but still. I would have liked to shake their hands one last time, especially with the old man, and not leave in a rush of panic.
However, that was not something I thought about right then. My head was throbbing and the adrenaline made everything seem jumbled up, incoherent. Elli said I was bleeding a little from my ear. I felt like my entire head would explode. Desiré turned around and said I shouldn’t have run, that when a wasp comes close one should just sit still and wait for it to leave, and that it probably was the perfume that I was wearing that had attracted them. I wanted to tell him to go fuck himself, but somehow I managed to control myself enough to say that I wasn’t wearing any perfume, I hadn’t washed my hair for almost a week and it’s not that easy to sit still when there is a wasp crawling around inside both of your ears.
Then I took a painkiller, and fell asleep.
My father is very allergic to insect bites, so much so that he has to carry around an epinephrine shot wherever he goes during the summer months. I, on the other hand, had only been stung once, just the summer before, and had therefore no idea of I was allergic too. That was something that was running through my throbbing head when I was slipping in and out of a foggy slumber on the bumpy road to the last village.
As it turns out, though, I have not inherited that particular trait from my father. We arrived in Firka, without me looking like a balloon in the face, only with a headache like I’ve never had before. Somehow, I managed to do the feedback session, even though I don’t really have a clear memory of how it went, and then it was time to head back to Ouagadougou. It felt kind of anticlimactic, not feeling the finality, only being off from adrenaline withdrawal, numb from painkillers and still stressed about it being so late.
That was the end of my fieldwork.
Despite adrenaline withdrawal, though, I was still present enough to feel the tinge of frustration from the fact that people throw plastic bags and other trash straight on the ground. If nothing else, don’t they think it’s aesthetically displeasing?
Oh, I wish my fieldwork could have ended on a better note than this. I’ll just have to remember that the rest of my fieldwork, at least to the most part, was a nice and exciting experience. Even if the end turned into a disaster.
Katja Malmborg 