Day Off

It's Saturday. Doing fieldwork I had never anticipated that it would be hard to take "days off." I sorta thought the research would be cushioned by a lots vacationy type days. This has not been the case. My research assistants come over from 8-4 Monday - Thursday and 8-11 on Friday (They have half day to go to mosque). However, they usually arrive between 7:30-7:45 and stay past four - browsing the internet and completing the third prayer of the day. This means that its only after 4 and on the weekends when I can work on a slew of administrative chores/my master plan. The other thing - its hard to know when enough is enough - you are swimming in a sea of potential data and you don't really know how to evaluate what is worth throwing your time into and what is just an interesting distraction. So you try to do lots of things - hoping that a couple will be relevant.

So what does a work day look like: One of my RAs and I went to visit a madrassa the other day. I had met the director through Drissa's dad a couple of years ago. He was very welcoming, although he didn't shake my hand, and took me around to visit the packed classrooms. Boys on one side and girls on the other. All the girls were wearing some kind of head covering. All the classes stood up to great us in Arabic and giggled at me when I spoke Bambara. I had been wondering how integrated madrassas are into the government education system. In my visit, I witnesssed school officials coming to monitor curriculum. The 9th grade class was covering civic education and the violent events right before the Traore dictatorship was taken down. In addition to the director, we interviewed four different teachers, some who shook my hand and some who didn't, who spoke about their experiences. Upon leaving I got to meet the directors first wife, who was covered in black without even an eye slit showing, but I could see through her veil that she was pretty young. She was stopping by to visit him at school. Then we went back to my house and joined the other RAs to keep coding the university student interviews.

So now its the weekend. I slept in, but paid the price and woke up sweating. I went to take a shower, but the water was cut. I wanted to go to the pool today, but the radiator in our car broke - so its day 3 off Drissa at the garage and me homebound. There is a lot of action in our neighborhood. Rumor has it - one of the families down the block is marrying off 6 of their daughters today. (It is some tradition where they all get married together - can you imagine if we had that in the US - no siblings can get married until everyone is ready to do it at once?). There are multiple cows tethered outside their house - so I know this is going to be a big party.