remembering fieldwork

Written in a train on Wednesday, 10 days ago:

I have spent the last couple of days in Härnösand at an MFS reunion. MFS (Minor Field Study) is the grant that Elli and I received from Sida (the Swedish international development cooperation agency) to do our fieldwork in Burkina Faso. It is a grant given to thesis-writing bachelor and master students who want to go and do fieldwork in a “developing country”. Before anyone is allowed to go out in the field, we have to take a preparatory course (which Elli and I did a year ago), and now they arranged an optional follow-up course for us MFS alumni.

It consisted of a combination of fieldwork debrief and sessions about what to do from now on, if we want to stick around in the development sector.

I found the sessions on fieldwork debrief oddly unsettling and came out of them with a feeling of wanting to cry. I had forgotten how tough mine and Elli’s particular fieldwork experience had been, what with coup d’état and Elli’s malaria and how certain relationships with our local contacts developed, partly due to culture clashes. Hearing of other’s both tough and exuberantly positive experiences made me feel ill at ease when trying to relate those to my own. Maybe I haven’t had time to properly deal with what I went through, emotionally.

(Another indicator of this is how distracted I got when the news came of the brief military coup that took place in Burkina a couple of weeks ago. It’s natural to get worried and frustrated when news of that sort reaches you, of course, but the way I emotionally responded to the news, with problems concentrating and general despair, makes me think I probably had some kind of coup d’état flashbacks from last October.)

Doing fieldwork is though. I think it is rare that anyone returns home from a three month fieldwork experience only bringing back the collected data. I had hundreds of GPS coordinates, photographs and notes, but I also brought home a whole new person. Me, changed. I might not have had time to fully understand the traces left in me by Burkina Faso yet.