On the hardships of fieldwork

 Musings on the hard field work of AD students ‘n stuff

 

I know studying doesn’t sound very hard to most people,

“so what do you do?”

“I study”

“oh so you must have lots of free time”.


I don’t know how many times I have heard that. It is very hard to make people understand that to study is a very hard job mentally, and sometimes (mostly an effect of the bad chairs) hard physically as well. And the hardest task is that of conducting a study in a foreign country where you can only barely make yourself understood.

The stress factors for a student, and here I especially think of the stresses put upon an Agricultural Development (AD) student (as I am, I am sure most are aware…), of a forced 3 months forced exile from our homeland (even though I know that some of you are using the three months to go home:-), are many. 


One must remember that in the academic world there is no mercy if you screw up, as our tutor once said; Credibility is like virility, once lost it stays lost.

For an average AD student the stresses are comprised of: the expectations of your host, your own expectations, your tutors expectations, the monetary burden of the stay, the differences of culture, the differences of language and of course there is that most stressful part of them all, the complete lack of spare time. So the pressures on your average student for making a good assignment are many, and this imposes extra stress factors on top of the home stress factors, deadlines and such.

 

Thank God I am not an average student! Most of the response to my small musing has been that people think that we are just enjoying ourselves down here, living the Pura Vida; and they are right!


The only limitations we have set so far is that the Whiskey cannot be served before 20.00, and we have to go and work out at least once a week (mostly twice). And then of course we have the goal of visiting San Jose at least once a week, preferably twice. Guapiles is about as interesting as Løgstør (look it up. If I have offended anyone by this statement, tough), the family we live with is anything but interesting, in reality we don’t really see each other as they use most of their free time on each of their rooms with locked doors watching TV, and to top it off, it is so humid that is drives us nuts.


This is of course also an excuse for visiting Martin the anthropologist, and discus meaningless things until the sun gets up even though we have interviews the day after. We did that last night, smoked the water pipe I brought him, drank a lot of beer and crashed three persons in his SMALL room. We had to be at an important meeting at 0900, but who cares? The meeting went very well, that’s another matter. I hope Martin uses us as we use him, because if we didn’t get out of Guapiles and had some other entertainment than just the two of us, we would be climbing the walls. The largest problem we have encountered so far is acute boredom, but with the arrival of our families next week, that will pass I am sure. I have another darker aspiration for the holiday. As many of you know, Anna, my partner in crime, is engaged with a Swedish Swede from Sweden, and is getting married in the autumn. She is still newly (madly?) in love, and this means that she thinks about Daniel (as he is called) a LOT. Nothing bad about that, but I hope that the three week Daniel injection (pun intended) will suffice to once again focus the young and fragile mind of my work mate:-)


I know that I miss my kids and my wife, but I am so old and experienced (and a bit, oh what’s it called…oh yeah, senile) now that I can just drink my way out of it; they have excellent coffee here!

 

Nah, we are actually enjoying ourselves and learning a lot on the way. The project is not as we had assumed it would be, but then again, assume makes an ass of u and me. We knew from back home that we had to be flexible, and so far we have managed. I think that if were paid for doing this I would work a lot harder, but as it is, I really cannot be bothered. We are getting enough results for the writing even if it is in Spanish all of it, and so I for one don’t really care about the rest however interesting it might be.

 

We are getting to be known faces in Guapiles and some places in San Jose, with people saying hola or buenos every time we pass. I think they have found out that we aren’t Gringo’s, which is a derogatory name for Americans. They really don’t like them here, which is a bit strange ‘cause many of them wants to be like the Americans.

 

Today, as we went “home” from San Jose I was forced to take the stair-seat (you know, where the stairs go down in the back of the bus; on the floor). In the back seat were three Tico’s (Costa Ricans), and they were definitely from the lower parts of the society. They were rather suspicious at first, and were just looking at me in a not especially friendly way. That coupled with the fact that they were a bit drunk and was in the process of liquidating another bottle, made me consider how I wanted my bus ride. I could of course stoneface them and hope they wouldn’t throw the empty bottles after us when we had to get of, or I could take the initiative and charge into conversation.


Now, I had to endure many hours of military tactics as part of my career in the system, and the one thing I always understood was that you must at all times strive to keep the initiative. So I asked them what is, was they were drinking in my horrible Spanish (and it is still dreadful). After some small chat, they discovered I were a fellow soccer interested, (I really am not, but it is such a small sacrifice to make and allows you to talk to most people), beer drinking (it stayed at the talking about rather than drinking), women loving (yep), no-gringo foreign person who were interested in communicating. We quickly became “brothers”. They were very interested in Denmark, the Danes and their soccer (were they better than the Tico’s?), their beer and especially (yep) their women. 


Don’t worry, I tried to keep the conversation on a relatively innocent level; after all, it is limited how much you can talk “dirty” when my Spanish is crap and their English were worse! They tried to pull me into town when the bus stopped, but fortunately I had to get of before them; at this point there were RATHER drunk. I am probably going to run into my newfound best friends again in Guapiles, and then we’ll have that beer they promised me:-), it never hurts to go native!

 

Well, this will be the last mail for 3 weeks, as I sure as H*** aren’t going to take of some of my valuable family time to write you guys.

 

“Look for my coming, 3 weeks from now, at dawn, look to the East”

 

or rather; until then, Hasta Luego

 

 

Jesper the Tico-fied “estudiante con Dinamarca”.