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| My anthropological 'team' has grown this week. Rains have come and cooled everything
off but had a rather negative effect on the electricity. I have let writing up my
notes slip more than I should this week. Starting with one young Pathan to do interviews for me I have expanded the interviewing team to include 4 Punjabis. This came about partly as an accident. A man came to me and said he needed to borrow 5000 rupees. I tol dhim I don't loan money but if his son wanted a job I would give him a job to where he will make some of the 5000 rupees his father needs. He first thought I meant manual labour-- working in the fields-- and wasn't very enthusiastic about his son doing the kind of work he does. When he learned that it would be more like an office job and require his son's reading and writing skills he was pleased. He then wanted to make sure I wouldn't have his son working past 10 at night. I assured him I did not want his son hanging around after 8 at night at the latest and mostly I was interested in him working with me in the mornings. This son however never showed up to claim the job. His brother heard about it and came to me and asked if he could do the job with a friend of his. I thought about it and decided that an interview team was a good idea. One to ask questions the other to handle the recording part. The problem with this is that I am paying them per interview so if there is one person or two they get the same money for one interview. The father then came and asked me how his first son was working. I told him he never showed so I had hired his other son. He got very upset with me and said that I should have come to him and he would have made his son show up. I got a little upset with him and told him that I wasn't interested in hiring someone if I had to rely on their father to make them show up for work. Three people then came to me to assure me that this young man did want to work but he didn't understand that working for a westerner meant you had to show up for appointments but they had explained to him that when he works for me he must be punctual. So the next meeting he showed up only one hour late and was enthusiastic and seemed to be interested in the work. Finally a fourth boy (15/16 years old) asked through a friend of his whether he could work for me. I decided that I can handle a larger team. The limitation is that I have only one diskman so it must be relayed around between the interviewers. The interviewers are under 20 and students. There is one Pathan, 2 Mian brothers, 1 Malik Gujar, and 1 non-Malik Gujar. I think the caste breakdown and the location of each of their houses will all work in my favour. I have told them all to begin the questionnaires within their own families and then to start on their neighbours. I will not get the whole vilalge at the pace they are working but I might get lucky and have a large enough sample that I might see some possible trends that I can follow up on. I have tried to refrain from criticising Pakistan's civil service but I must admit that WAPDA is pushing the limits of my patience. This week we had a 41 hour cut in electricity forllowed by three days of frequent 1-3 hour cuts. In the week leading up to the big cut every night the electricity cut out due to winds for 3-4 hours. I have now learned that the trransformer that WAPDA installed in January had a major fault and had to be completely reinstalled and parts replaced. Luckily we have some influential Maliks in this village or we'd still be without electricity. What I noticed among villagers is a lack of expressed emotion at the electricity cuts. They said a quiet swear word or two when the electricity was cut and then went about their lives as if they'd never had electricity. When the power returned however they cheered and clapped their hands and were openly delighted. So they did notice the absence and it did bother them but they are resigned to frequent power failures and other inconveniences. This reminded me of something my friend, Malik Asif, said to me once. It seemed to me that almost all Muslim holidays were sad events. He said that was ok because there were 40 or 50 days in the year when they had to be sad and then they could be happy every other day. Somehow 40 to 50 days of enforced sadness out of 365 doesn't appeal to me. Especially when you take into account that the other 310-320 days are not guarunteed to be happy. The villagers level of tolerance of unhappiness is far superior to my own. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing and I'm not sure I'm typical enough in my impatience with inconvenience to consitute a valid cross cultural comparison. Because of the power failures I started writing up my notes on paper. I normally use paper for scratch notes but they are mostly keywords with names. In order to conserve my battery (and then when the battery died on me) I started writing up my notes on paper with the intention of feeding them into the computer later. I am a fairly fast typist on a computer but it's another job I don't much care for (even when it's for myself). So there are currently some embarrassing gaps in my field notes. I may or may not get those paper notes fed into the computer before I go back to England. If not before I leave Pakistan, eventually they will get in or it defeats the purpose of having content codes and search engines to pre-analyse my notes. Another problem with the electricity cuts is that it's not so easy to work late into the night-- which is when I usually do my note write ups. So apart from having written them on paper I have not written nearly as many as I should have. A friend of mine emailed me and told me not to be so hard on myself about my inadequacies and perhaps she's right-- all the same I'd rather do more here than I need to than less. Besides, that's what friends are for-- to tell you your flaws aren't as bad as you think. |
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