adventures in ethnography

Well, things are moving along, and I feel like we’ve gotten a good start, albeit slow, on our study. Sometimes, when daily life is so monumentally alien to us (bucket showers, no internet, pit latrines, oh my!) it’s easy to forget that we’re here to actually do work! We will be researching adolescent nutrition in the Haydom area and ultimately trying to understand ways to make culturally-based nutrition programs targeting adolescents. It seems to be a very neglected topic here, with most health outreach focusing on maternal and child health and HIV. We are the only wazungu living outside the hospital compound, which puts us in a 24-hour a day ethnography. We’ve already learned a TON in the past 2 weeks and haven’t formally started the study yet. We went with the outreach clinic to a village yesterday about 45 minutes away from Haydom, and the difference between food resources was amazing! To us Americans, Haydom seems like a barren food waste-land, with few pre-packaged foods (soda, a handful of cookies, some peanut butter, and that’s about it – there is one type of canned cheese and a bottle of Alter Wine in the ‘wazungu’ shop in town, and if you know us, that’s going to make for a long 10 months). In the village there was even less, a few greens, onions and mangos being sold, and some generic cookies. In interviewing people, their diet was amazingly monotonous, especially now, in the dry season when the crops aren’t growing and the wild vegetables and fruits aren’t available. Basically, they eat a stiff maize dough called ugali, and maybe some milk, beans and greens if they are lucky.

We’ve spent the past week and a half meeting people, and preparing our research materials, namely taking pictures of local foods for a pile-sorting exercise. I don’t know what I would do without my #1 research assistant Ryan who’s graphic design skills have been indispensible! We’re both excited to get them done and get the final research clearance so we can try them out (ok, I’m excited for the nerdy anthropology part of it, Ryan’s just excited to get moving).
-Betsy