After 2 months; some problems have come up... And they are not solved yet. However; I try to get a hold on the situation and to spend the last 2 1/2 weeks as good as I can.
Together with my interpreter I planned to spent the last week of February in Nimpouya. However, some unexpected activities came up which resulted in my interpreter being too busy to join me to the village. When we discussed this it turned out that for the coming weeks eight and nine he also did not have time to help me. However, in weeks five and six we had discussed this, also with his supervisor, and we agreed on a certain programme which gave us the chance to spend time in the villages for two more weeks.
These discussions got more tense in weeks seven and eight and finally resulted almost in an argument. The African way of communicating began to work on my nerves as well: all the time my interpreter kept saying ‘no problem’ but there were indeed serious problems! I have the feeling that nobody understands me and my interpreter, who just had begun to become a good friend, I saw now as only an obstacle for my research.
Maybe these problems are being ‘feeded’ also by the fact that since these weeks I have seriously had the feeling of ‘culture shock’. Everything costs too much energy, everybody gets on my nerves all the time. The food, the temperature, the people, the environment, I have been fed up with basically everything and I long to see, hear and taste something familiar for a change.
Besides, I find doing research with an interpreter is very difficult. Sometimes it works fine, but there are times that it does not work at all. This has, in my opinion, several reasons. First of all, my interpreter is familiar with the villages where I am doing research. In the beginning I regarded this as an advantage. The interviewed persons often were relatives or friends. Which made that we had good conversations with these people. But a disadvantage is that my interpreter often chit-chatted with this person, in between my questions. This made me feel that, when I posed another question, I interrupted in their conversation. I talked about this with my interpreter, but he does not seem to understand the problem. If the interviewed person was not familiar with my interpreter, the conversations were more formal and my interpreter kept the translations short, which made me feel that he did not translate all that had been said.
Besides this, I find it also difficult to do research with an interpreter because I do not only have to make sure that the interviewed person has told me everything he or she knows about the subject, I also have to check whether the interpreter has translated everything that has been said, or even, whether he has not added some information himself to make the answer more complete! Now that I start to learn more and more of the local language, I have discovered this.
I have therefore tried to find an other interpreter for the time that is left. I found someone and we went to the villages together. But it was not the same. He did not understand me quite well, he did not understand my purpose of research and the way that the interviews should be held. Moreover, I had the feeling that he did not translate the responds exactly as the interviewed person had answered them. Besides, this man does not speak the language of the pastoralists, so I could only do interviews with Mossi people. Therefore, I found this was not the solution to my problem.
But all in all I try to make the best of it and to solve the problems as soon as possible. You have to think possitive; especially when you're on your own and there is no one who can encourage you. I think many other people would have given up on the situation long ago; or they would have gotten angry (which actually might have helped to solve the problem sooner than it does now, but I am not a person that gets angry often.
Well, that's it for now. I am going to relax a bit and read a book! (about Africa, of course...)
