My family and friends have been asking for a bit of narrative about what I am doing here. It would have been a bit easier a few months ago, before my responsibilities multiplied.
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I am in Dhaka city more often than I was before, because I am now interning for the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme). At least 3 days a week I go to the IDB Bhaban, where the majority of UN offices in Bangladesh are housed. Some of my assignments are really interesting–monitoring the bills in Parliament, for example; others are less exciting. Today, for example, I’m translating parliamentary committee lists into English. Not so fun, but also not so taxing.
My second responsibility is to the Char Fasson Orphanage. When I am in Char Fasson, I sleep in a guest room on the second floor of a building that used to house all the children. Now, it’s in such bad repair that all the children live in two separate buildings on either side of the original structure. The orphanage provides a good place from which to conduct my research, but I spend a great deal of time doing no research at all. Instead, I am often hanging out with the children, helping them to play on the computer I brought for them, taking pictures, and showing pictures. This past week, T and I helped to write a proposal for Save the Children, which would provide up to $40,000 for livestock, salaries, construction, etc at the orphanage. The goal is to make the orphanage self-sustaining, so that it does not have to depend on either the government or individual donors for its financial stability.
My third responsibility (rather, the first) is to my dissertation research. This component involves a number of different activities: listening to the conversations of those with whom I am familiar in Char Fasson, interviews with various religious officials and leaders, and observation of a number of religious events. As I’ve noted in previous posts, some of my best ‘data’ comes quite unexpectedly, but I like to think that’s it’s all a part of placing myself in the right situations and keeping my eyes and ears open. My research is essentially about the application of Islamic law in rural areas. I have yet to decide, though, if the final dissertation will be more about women’s interaction with systems of law or on the issues of religious knowledge of various religious officials in the rural area. Right now, I’m trying to focus on these things called salish courts; they are local courts which are assumed to have a certain right to operate, merely because the participants agree to abide by the decision of the local ‘judge’. But the people who sit and make judgments in these courts are not trained in law necessarily. They are chosen because they are supposed to be honest, trust-worthy people who will make a just decision.
That’s a fairly good summary of what I’m doing here. There are lots of other details that consume my life–heat, mosquitos, (lack of) electricity–but that’s all supposed to be secondary to my ‘real’ tasks. I think at this point–six and a half months in–that it’s fair to say that I’m a fairly good fieldworker, but my strong point really is in my self-awareness of what I’m doing. I hope that some of my future publications will be about the process of doing fieldwork and the challeneges that arise, especially as a non-Muslim woman working in a patriarchal Muslim area.
