In November it was finally time to leave. And to start a new chapter of life: one year of fieldwork at border posts in Kenya. My first stop was Malaba at the Ugandan-Kenyan border, along a highway where to trucks pass daily, while the town itself is more like a marginalised village without a working sewage system, where people face poverty and cholera outbreaks.
Every night my sleep was guided by the booming music from the neighbouring strip club. The same-same playlist which constantly reminded me on high HIV rates at border towns due to prostitution. Border towns are places where most people only pass by. No one wants to stay, unless you have to. But slowly you adapt. You discover the benefits of living near the border. After having visited six different border posts, I am now in the middle of fieldwork.
And I feel that it is time for a critical reflection on research methodology. Shortly before leaving to Kenya, a. The presentations showed that methods in the field could vary significantly from what students learn in methodology lectures. The same applies to my current project.
It took me a while to understand that this did not mean that I was doing it wrong. I came to realise that fruitful ethnography is most of all the ability of adaption, whereby the ethnographer is led by the field, its circumstances, its people and their needs. In the context of war against terror, Kenya additionally tightens security along its national boundaries. There, an anthropologist will rarely be asked for research permits or introduction letters so that some researchers do not even bother to get them.
At the border setting however, first meetings with my interview partners often started with the request to see these documents. Bureaucratic ways to get research permits take time and patience. If even in Germany I feel my head is almost bursting when dealing with administrative issues, no wonder it did even more in the unfamiliar environment of Nairobi. At the OSBPs, officers belong to various departments, and those differ in their inner logics and hierarchies.
