2 January 2009

Five hundred

That is the number of pages I filled in MS Word the past three months. Illustrating situations which happened, typing my notes, processing information from conversations, uttering thoughts, pointing out impressions, etc. Everything has to be typed when it’s still freshly in my head. Every day I sit with my portable on my lap for at least two hours, ‘throwing everything out’. When I’m done, I feel like I’ve done a ‘number two’: empty and satisfied, but knowing I have to go again tomorrow.

Every little bit of information you think is usable, you have to check twice, no three or more like four, five times. Because people say different things at different moments, which don’t correspond. Or they say something and then go and do the opposite. Or they tell you things you’re not able to interpret right because of a lack of background knowledge.

The first few weeks I often felt overwhelmed by all the new and the contradictory, but by observing what people say, what they say they do, and what they actually do, you are slowly granted more insight. You have to be focused at all times, merely a little detail can be important and suddenly make you realize something: a casual comment , a reaction from a person on a situation, a conflict.

I’m a researcher, but that doesn’t mean that I walk around here with a microphone, chasing people like a journalist. No, the most things I learn are acquired through spontaneous situations and informal conversations and by building friendly relations with people. There are a lot of laughs and there is a lot of jokingly fooling around which as already resulted in hilarious photos and video clips. When a conversation starts about a topic of which I feel it could be meaningful for my research, my questions are more to the point and I reach for my notebook – if the situation allows it. I’ve already scribbled my way through about a dozen of those. It’s a puzzle of a thousand little pieces and every piece I discover gives me a kick.

Long story short: the way of life here is relaxed – that’s why it’s Africa – but my brain is constantly working hard.

On the 2nd of January I’m done here. This was my ‘orientation period’. I had two goals. First, learning the language in which I’ve become reasonably good, which wasn’t that simple in the beginning because it almost entirely took place without a ‘shared intermediary language’ like English ore GSL – as most of the people here are monolingual in AdaSL. The second goal was acquiring a broad impression of the life of deaf people in Adamorobe, in the way described in the paragraphs above.

It will be a hell of a chore, but those 500 pages have to be analyzed. With a computer program I divide little pieces of information in different categories. Potential usable pieces have to be filtered out and new questions have to be formulated. I’ll have to pick out themes and subjects which will get special attention in my second research period, which will last six months. I also already have to write a first research report and in April I will have to take part in a kind of oral exam to be allowed to continue this doctoral research. In May I’ll be back here, for my second and last research period, and then there will be regular blog posts again because I still have a whole list of subjects left that I want to blog about!