The Mogo: Fieldi

(if you don’t know how to say something in Swahili, just add an “i” onto the end of the English word. That’ll get you pretty close).

Last Wednesday night, around 1am we finally rolled back into Morogoro, after having been in Ngorongoro (not to be confused with each other) for two weeks doing field research. In development/health circles, you hear the term “field” a lot… so and so is in the field, he/she went to the field, when will you be back from the field?

The field is a term that collectively refers to anywhere but your home office. If you work in the head country office in Dar, then going to one of the regional offices in, say, Kilwa, is “the field”. If you live in Kilwa then going out to the bush to visit health facilities is “the field”. The field is a mystical and wonderful place that people are constantly disappearing to in Tanzania. You get the feeling it’s a little bit like going to the restroom at work…sometimes you go because you have a reason, sometimes you just want to get away from your desk for a bit. That is “the field”.

For the greater part of the last month I have been in the field, first in Kibaha and then Ngorongoro, with Clement and another colleague, Esron. Esron is a senior lecturer here at Sokoine University (where SACIDS is based) and the principal investigator (i.e. person in charge) of the mobile technology project that we were collecting data for.

During our trip, what we were doing was essentially visiting every ward (sort of like a county) in the two districts of Kibaha and Ngorongoro to collect data on human and animal health resources. We collected the data on cool smart phone mobile phones, which we then used to upload the data to the internet, where it was stored and mapped. We also took GPS coordinates for a number of animal health-related sites (like dip tanks, crushes, watering points). A LOT of animal health sites. The words: “there are just two more crushes”, will forever haunt me. But, if you happen to want to know where the marketplace is for cows in Olbalbal, or a water trough in bufu Endulen…I can help you with that.

Times out in the field are a unique and, generally, great experience. Besides the obvious awesomeness of getting to be out of the office, for a muzungo like me, it’s an amazing chance to see and experience everyday life in Tanzania. You sleep in bare-bones guesthouses, you take bucket showers, you get bruises from hitting the side of the Land Cruiser so hard and so often on insanely bad roads and you eat chipati and drink chai made by Tanzanian mamas in every single little town, outpost and dusty village. (and if your me, you eat very little else, since being a vegetarian is a bit of an anomaly in beef-eating-maasai country.)

On this last trip, we had our share of “glitches”, from car breakdowns to food poisoning (that was me) to livestock development officers who wanted nothing more than to ride around in our car all day while we GPS’ed every spring, brook and puddle that passed for an “animal watering point” in Soit Sambu. But, in the end, I know the weeks I’ve spent out in the field in Tanzania will be some of my favorite memories here. Getting to see this beautiful country, test out my Swahili, and be the only white person for millllllles around traveling with 3 Tanzanian men is a pretty unique experience. Not everyone gets to do that and I am really grateful that I’ve been able to.

A few pictures from our recent time in the infamous “field” (in this case, Ngorongoro):