Fieldwork. Is. Slow.

I have to take it as a sign, that after my first failed meeting in the community of my fieldwork, I came across this guy.  Meet the official mascot of Team Jessica:

This approximates the pace I feel I’ve fallen into. 

Fieldwork. Is. Slow.  Fieldwork is meant to be slow.  But I’m battling some powerful demons that really want things to be going fast.  Though anthropology is unique in its in-depth approach to research, because it exists in the universe of academia, it is not removed from the pressures (one might say obsession) with the capability to quickly gather, analyze and publish data.  Add on top of that an increasingly indebted graduate student who is eager to have a real job and earn a salary above the poverty line, and a difficult scenario unfolds. 

I desperately want to do my fieldwork and to do it damn well.  However, my reality is always breathing down my neck.

I spent my first two weeks in Wa working on understanding how food insecurity is institutionally understood and addressed in the Upper West. I conducted interviews with NGOs and other bodies involved in food and farming interventions as well as went out of some field trips to the communities where they work.  Such work is vital to ethnography.  It provides context to the more particular description of the experience of food insecurity that I will demonstrate through my data collection.  Once I felt good about my integration into the institutional context of food insecurity, I took the steps to get myself into the empirical context.

The community where I will be living and working is a community I identified in preliminary fieldwork two years ago.   In my 2 preliminary field seasons I have met with and gained the repeated approval of the local presiding chief as well as the members of the community.  In conferring with my colleagues in Wa  about the most appropriate manner to finally get myself re-integrated into the community for the year ahead, I was told that I should hold a community wide meet and greet.  Team Jessica had in mind a focus group that would kick off her data collection.  Team Jessica thought that two previous meet and greets got the job done and that the community would very well remember me.  However, when I recall that it is common practice in Ghana to officially welcome someone into a room after they have been gone for a 5 minute errand, I caved to the meet and greet idea.   Having grown up in a small town, I know that adhering to the local social protocol and not being a pushy outsider is the best way to make a good and sustainable community entrance.    I sent word to the chief to organize a meeting. When I arrived on the morning of the meeting, I noticed that men were walking out of town with their farming tools.  That was not a good sign.  That indicated that people were not going to be hanging around for my meet and greet but rather going to their farms to work.  It turns out that the chief had failed to deliver the message for the meeting.  The meet and greet was a bust. It was the perfect beginning to what will, I'm sure be more busts.  It was also the perfect situation with which to feel all the more excited to board a bus for Accra to spend the Thanksgivingukkah week with a friend and attend the traditional engagement ceremony of friends. 

I thought a butternut squash would be a good substitute for pumpkin for procuring pumpkin pie.  However, said butternut squash was, in fact, a spaghetti squash.  Pie left the feasting picture, but donuts entered. These fabulous fried pillows of dough are called sufganiyot and are the official donut of Hanukkah.  They are 100% made from scratch-from the golden apple jam filling to the powdered sugar topping. 

Grated sweet potatoes for latkes 

Bread crumbs smothered in butter, oyster mushrooms, shallots and garlic and ready to be drenched in homemade stock

Engagement ceremony dancing.  

And now It’s  December and I’m 2 months behind my “official research schedule” and doing my best to be ok with that. Though I officially got nothing accomplished in my week away, I’ve returned to the Upper West with a renewed sense of grit and moxy.   It was a week vital to my mental health. I finally got to sink my teeth into the novel Americanah and got to do so in a beautiful house in the beautiful mountains of the Eastern Region where the sunsets are a stunning background to an early evening Earl Grey and the breezes are equally delicious. When I wasn’t reading, I was cooking delicious food and talking  through fieldwork follies with my anthropologist-in-arms comrade and friend.  And I got to take a hot shower.  It’s not just the hot part that is exciting about that statement.  It is also the shower part.  Never underestimate the power of a functioning shower head. 

This be fieldwork in Ghana.