Fieldwork Reflections | Ethiopia
Written by Jed Stevenson | Graduate Student
Southwest Ethiopia: Town and Country |
My fieldwork site was Jimma, a town in southwest Ethiopia. I’d been to Ethiopia before I settled there to do my research -- I’d visited the great archaeological sites of the north, where a Christian empire ruled for centuries; I’d traveled to the ethnically and linguistically diverse Southern region of the country where more than twenty distinct languages and cultures coexist; and I’d worked with CARE on a survey in Borana, near the Kenyan border.
In 2007, though, I settled down in Jimma, a place that gets relatively few visits from either tourists or anthropologists. It’s famous as being the place where coffee originated, and coffee is still an important part of Jimma’s economy. Jimma’s region is wetter than most parts of Ethiopia: there are rolling, green hills, and most people in the region make a living growing maize, sorghum, or cash crops like coffee. There’s a great cultural divide between the town and the countryside: most people in Jimma town speak Amharic, and about half of them are Christian, but in the surrounding countryside people speak Oromo and almost all of them are Muslim.
Developing a Research Question |
At first, I was interested in the economic effects of Western-style education. Although the system has expanded rapidly over the past 30 years, less than half of school-aged children in Ethiopia are enrolled in schools. Adult literacy is 36%, according to UNICEF. These figures are less surprising when you consider that eighty per cent of the population is rural, and ox-powered farming is the most common source of livelihood. In this context, I wondered -- how do the knowledge and qualifications children gain at school help them and their families economically? During a summer in Borana prior to fieldwork, I worked on a survey of household consumption, which is a tool for investigating economic differences.
But some of my experiences during my first visits to Ethiopia prompted me to reframe my research topic. I remember on my first visit being asked by a mother for advice on her child’s eyes, which were gummed up from conjunctivitis. Another time, a woman showed me an infected wound on her leg, and asked me how she should treat it. I couldn’t provide much help to either of them, beyond giving money for medicine or a bar of soap. Experiences like this made me feel uneasy about doing research in Ethiopia without engaging with problems of health and disease.
After my second year in Anthropology, I took time out to study Public Health through a fellowship with the Center for Health, Culture and Society. I returned to Ethiopia for fieldwork with a new question in hand -- ‘How does parents’ schooling affect their children’s life chances?’ I was still interested in the job prospects of school-leavers. But “life chances” includes not only economic opportunities, but also survival. It’s a question that’s relevant both to policies on education and human rights, and to demography and population health.
Demographic surveys from many countries show that mothers who have been to school are less likely to see their children die young, regardless of their economic status. Why women’s schooling has this positive effect on child survival is the subject of a lot of speculation. My hypothesis was that women who had been to school would have healthier children either because of literacy skills (which would help them to decipher instructions on a packet of medicine or information in the media) or because of familiarity with cultural scripts for interaction with doctors and nurses (which might help them negotiate the healthcare system). So women who had been to school might have different feeding practices (e.g. longer exclusive breast feeding), be more open to preventive health measures such as vaccination, and take prompter, more effective action when their children were ill.
Mixed Methods |
My project is based both on participant observation in the school system and on a longitudinal survey of a group of infants. I spent a good deal of time in schools, taking notes on the contents of lessons and styles of interaction – anything that might have an influence on childrearing. I video-recorded a day in the life of a first-grade class, and showed the footage to teachers and students, to elicit their ideas about schooling. I also visited a Muslim school, where children were being taught how to read the Quran in Arabic. Education in Jimma is not monolithic; for some, it includes instruction in Arabic and Ge’ez (the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox church), and religious schools operate in parallel with the secular government schools.
In the longitudinal survey, I followed a group of infants through their first two years of life, monitoring their health and development over time. For this part of the project, I worked initially with researchers from Jimma University’s Faculty of Public Health, who helped me identify families to enroll in the study; then I recruited and trained a team of eight women who worked with me for a year monitoring the development of children in the 150 families who took part in the study. Each time we visited a household, we would interview the mother about what the child was eating, whether the child had been ill in the past month, and so on. We would also measure the child’s physical growth (height, weight, etc.) and play some games (stacking blocks, throwing a ball, etc.) that served as tests of psychosocial development status.
In the final rounds of the survey, we asked parents what grade they had reached in school, tested their reading abilities, and asked them about their expectations for the child’s future. According to my hypothesis, those who had longer schooling and better reading abilities would also have healthier children.
High Points and Low Points in the Field |
Some of the low points during the time in the field were when children we were working with became ill. Out of the 150 in our study, three children died within the year. Two died of malaria before they reached their first birthdays, and one died shortly after his first birthday, from a congenital condition that couldn’t be treated. The two children who died of malaria came down with fevers very quickly, and within 24 hours they were dead. In both cases the mothers had contact with health workers during these episodes of fever; but in both cases, failures of communication prevented the children from getting the life-saving medicine they needed. Four other children were seriously malnourished, and urgently needed the additional food that we were able to provide. One of my research assistants ran off with a computer I had lent him, never to be seen again. During these times, I would feel lonely and I would sometimes doubt the value of what I was doing.
But there were bright moments in my time in Ethiopia, too. When two women who worked with me gave birth, I was invited along with neighbors and relatives to eat porridge and welcome the new babies into the community. Toward the end of the survey, I was often invited to birthday parties of children who had been newborns when the study began – and who were now walking and babbling. Those were happy occasions because I felt that I was seeing how these babies, being welcomed into the community, were becoming social persons in their own right; and at the same time, I felt that I was becoming part of the community. Another high point of my time in the field was showing the video I’d made at the primary school to a group of first-grade students who’d never seen themselves on a TV screen before.
I was also lucky to have a fellow graduate student doing fieldwork in Ethiopia at the same time as me: my friend and comrade Kenny Maes was based a day’s bus-ride away, in the capital city, Addis Ababa. We would meet up every month or so to decompress and compare notes.
Lessons from the Field |
Regarding schooling, I’ve come to see what a complex variable it is. When demographers bracket populations according to “primary or lower” or “high school or above”, there’s a welter of experiences that they’re reducing to “zero” or “one”. By spending time observing classrooms in Jimma, I got the sense that the social environment of the school, with its pecking order, its rituals, and its codes for interaction with authority figures could be a powerful influence on how you act in a clinic or a government office. Religious schools, with their own distinctive environments, languages, and doctrines, provide yet another kind of socialization.
Now that I’ve carried out a longitudinal survey project, I can see that there are pros and cons to this kind of research. Supervising the day-to-day activities of the survey took up more than half my time. Since I didn’t have any managerial experience beforehand, I had to learn those skills along the way. And because the families we worked with were both in the city and in the countryside, bus transport occupied a lot of my time.
The advantage of longitudinal work is getting to know the families you work with quite well over the course of the project, which doesn’t happen in cross-sectional surveys. Although I haven’t analyzed the data yet, this, I think, will be the strength of my study: in addition to determining whether there is an association between mothers’ schooling and children’s health, we should be able to tell what it is about those families with schooling that makes the difference. I’ve certainly gained a new perspective on mortality rates. Infant mortality in Ethiopia is 75 per 1,000 live births. So in the country as a whole, you would expect at least seven out of every hundred children to die before reaching their first birthday. On this basis, the three deaths we saw among the 150 children in our study are relatively few. But it makes a big difference when you know the children and their families. They’re not just statistics.