African Soil

Dear friends,

There is something about African soil that makes it different from all the other soil you can find in the world. African soil follows you wherever you go. It gets all over your clothes, in your hair, on your shoes, your feet. African soil gets on and under your skin, in all the good and all the bad ways. It is so powerful that you can never truly get rid of it – even after a proper wash. If you have once touched African soil, it never leaves you again. African soil represents everything about Africa.

If you are close to me, you probably know that coming here has been an enormous struggle. I was supposed to leave for Zimbabwe in September 2023. Unfortunately, though, my university decided to really complicate this process and it took 7 months to get permission to come. Once that had been obtained in October, things suddenly became hard in Zimbabwe, where my work permit was turned down because my diplomas had to be legalised rather than certified (this required trips to court, a notary, several ministries and the embassies in London and Brussels, all for some stupid stamp). When in December the Research Council of Zimbabwe suddenly decided that they no longer wanted me to work with the Ministry of Health and Child Care, my research reached an all-time low and it became very uncertain if I could still go to Zimbabwe and finish my PhD. There were times when I seriously considered quitting all together, because the 10 months wait started to take a toll on my well-being. When I finally heard all permissions had come through by the end of January, I was so exhausted that I wasn’t even happy to go anymore. I had almost lost my love for my PhD and my research topic. At the same time, I was hopeful that my upcoming journey would make me fall in love again with my PhD.

It's March 2024 now and here I am – in Zimbabwe (Chimanimani, to be precise). I was initially supposed to stay for six months and do research in two areas: Chimanimani and Chipinge, but because of the delays, I had to cut down my workload. I decided to apply a case study to Chimanimani as my base would be there anyway, and it seemed easiest to stay close to where I would be staying. For those of you who forgot, I do research on the relationship between the climate crisis and child marriages. A lot of people don’t get this – which is fine and understandable – more annoying are the mansplainers who try to convince a researcher who has dedicated 2,5 years of her life on this topic, that this linkage does not exist. I will give you a short introduction in my next blog, for now: let me tell you what my first month in Zimbabwe has been like.

After having spent a few weeks in Harare and a short holiday in Cape Town, we set off for Chimanimani on March 9. While I had initially planned to do all the driving myself here (I even took a 4-wheel driving course, which was amazing), I soon found that it was really difficult to rent a well-insured vehicle for a decent price. I had to end up renting a car through my institution of affiliation in Harare, which came with a driver. Although I was first saddened by the fact that I wouldn’t be driving up any steep muddy hills myself, I now thank heaven and earth for having sent driver Washington to me. Not only is Washington my personal cheerleader whose catchphrase is “We’re going to win!”, his presence also saved me when our first vehicle broke down on the way to Chimanimani. After 2,5 hours, the Jeep – which I had called “Joe” -could no longer make speed, and we got stranded in the absolute shithole of Rusape. Washington immediately called the office, and we ended up waiting for five hours for a new one. I soon had to give up all hopes that we would arrive in Chimanimani that day, but we did make it to the city of Mutare, where we arrived 12 hours after we had left the capital. That night in Mutare felt like I was trapped in the desert: it was at least 32 degrees in my room, and I was sweating like a pig who is brought to the slaughterhouse. Heat, in general, is a challenge in Zimbabwe: it can be so intense that even people with the worst ADHD will become as slow as turtles.

27 hours after departure, we finally made it to Chimanimani, where I am staying with a lovely family that owns a lodge. Chimanimani is nestled in the mountains of the Eastern Highlands and borders Mozambique. Weather is unpredictable here: one minute it can be sweltering hot and the next moment you feel like putting on your jumper. The intense heat that I experienced elsewhere in the country has now been exchanged for huge spiders (which is challenging when you are an arachnophobe like me) and feelings of intense loneliness as I am starting to feel like I’m stuck in the middle of nowhere with no one to talk to and nothing to do (more on this later).

On my first day of field work, I was reminded of the “bliss” of Zimbabwean bureaucracy. We had planned recruitment session in a ward 90 minutes away for the entire day, but my research assistants had apparently forgotten that we first needed to pay a courtesy visit to the local authorities. I was quite annoyed when they called me in the morning to tell me we had to go there first - not only should they have thought about that earlier, I also knew that the visit would delay all our other activities planned for the day. Assistant T. promised me that it would only take 10 minutes, but I knew that in Zimbabwe, things like these don’t take 10 minutes, and boy, was I right. 2.5 hours later, we had not only missed our first two recruitment sessions, but were also told that we could not get permission to go into the field by some power tripping bureaucrat who made up non-existing permissions we had to obtain, probably in the hopes of getting a bribe. I was fuming and furious: surely, I had not spent 10 months obtaining every possible research permit possible to be told by some pathetic guy in a local office that we could not start field work? Thank God though, someone else interfered and let us start. Apart from this initial hiccup, all the other field work activities have gone well. We spent five days going into every village in ward 21 (which was badly hit by cyclone Idai in 21) to tell heads of households and teenage girls about the research, in the hopes they want to participate. The latter does not seem to be a problem: every person who has attended our recruitment session wants to be involved and I am now in the process of selecting “the lucky few”. We try to select people from all sorts of backgrounds to make the process as inclusive as possible so we can paint the best possible picture of how lives here are affected by climate change.

While field work has gone well, I need to be honest, and admit that on a personal level, things have been tricky. While I was initially very excited to go to Chimanimani and start field work, the reality of living here hit me on the first day. I had just had a meeting with my research assistants, and we were done for the rest of the day, so we walked into the village to find sadza with beans (a mission almost impossible as Zimbabweans are huge carnivores). We walked to the market to buy the vegetables I purposefully hadn’t bought in Harare because I wanted to support the local economy, when I found out they only sell onions, tomatoes, and the odd avocado here. There are no supermarkets in Chimanimani, just a few tiny shops where you can buy eggs and toilet paper. For this reason, I had stocked up on canned beans, chickpeas, pasta and other items which I was sure I couldn’t get in Chims. But that first day at the market, when I found out that even most veggies aren’t for sale here, I started to feel suffocated by the isolation of this place. I knew from the journey here that the distance between Chimanimani and the nearest city was much bigger than I had initially anticipated: 140 km, or a 2.5 hours’ drive. During the drive from Mutare to Chimanimani, I realised that it was not a journey I could afford to do every weekend, as I had initially planned. Not only did the drive take much longer than it did in my memory, petrol was also much more expensive than I thought it would be. So, that first day in Chimanimani, when I was hoping to come home with bags full of fresh veggies and only walked up the hill with some tomatoes in my right hand, and an onion in the other, I started to fully grasp the situation I am in, and worse: that there seems to be no way out for the next 68 days.

In the past eight years, I have lived in four countries: Taiwan, China, Ireland, and now Zimbabwe. I have been through some tough moments in all of the other countries and there were times when I missed family and friends, but I’ve never been properly homesick. I thought I knew myself and my ability to adjust to new places and situations, but here I am in a village in the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe, and homesickness has hit me so hard that it hurts physically. The remedy for homesickness is staying active, making friends and going out. But the problem here is that the medicine for this crippling feeling of loneliness does not exist. There are no social activities here – no clubs or societies I could join, no game nights, no fun outings. When I ask my research assistants what their plans are for the weekend, their reply is always the same: sleeping. This seems to apply to all of Chimanimani, where everything shuts down at 5 pm and the only “exciting” thing people do is go to church on Sunday, which can go on all day.

The evenings and weekends are by far the worst because that’s when I’m not busy with field work. It gets dark early and after I’ve had dinner, I usually just count the hours until I can go to bed. On weekends, I try to stay active and hike (plenty of opportunity here but hiking on your own can make you feel even lonelier). At this moment, staying here truly feels like a matter of counting the days (68) until I can get out of here. I realise this might not be the story you were looking forward to hearing (I am sorry if I have chased you away from this blog already), but I have chosen to be honest about it because loneliness is not a feeling people talk about when discussing field work. I find that too often, ethnographic field work is portrayed as some fairy tale: you spend a few months in a different community, have the best time of your life because you get to know a new culture and language, and when you leave after a while, life will never be the same again because of the amazing time you had in the field. I am sure this applies to some people, and it might also start to apply to me at some stage, but after some research, I found out that loneliness is actually a very common feeling among researchers in the field. Just imagine being all alone in a different country and a completely different culture, in a very isolated place with nothing to distract you from your thoughts and try not to feel incredibly lonely (especially if you are a social person). That’s surely a high mountain to climb, isn’t it? Fortunately, I have climbed many mountains in life already. So even though I've been feeling immensely lonely and sad all week, I tell myself to stay courageous, as no feeling lasts forever.

Lots of love.