Minor Field Study in the Philippines

While the actual trip that I’ll cover in this diary begun on September 21st, the nature of the trip means that it begun in early spring this year. I’m going to the Philippines to perform field research for my Master’s degree in social anthropology. I will be researching the Reproductive Health Bill, a law that is being pretty heavily lobbied both for and against in the Philippines at the moment. Since I’m doing it with support from the Minor Field Study scholarship from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), the trip was approved early this year and I also had to attend the compulsory 2 day course for students conducting MFS students. This meant three days in Uppsala timed perfectly to when I would be as busy as possible preparing for my travel.

The trip up to Uppsala was in the middle of a perfect Indian summer, a voyage through harvested fields and forests slowly turning yellow. The wet dreams of romantic Germans, all over the place. Uppsala itself was like a cross between the more nostalgic old towns and the average, svenne-Swedish towns: too many stores and offices to match the creepy-crawly alleys of Lund, but far more 18th century facades to be compared to a city like Borås. A decent yet lazy town if the half-built station was anything to judge by: the sign “work begun in 2005” was followed by an enthusiastic count-down clock proclaiming the official opening of the station to be only 815 days away.

The course itself was a tad superfluous for people with any kind of anthropological background, especially someone who has done field research before. The fact that about 5 out of the 60 or so students attending were going to some place outside Africa also greatly skewed the balance of the course. However, this also made for great comedy for us few non-Africanists: we got to see their worried faces in the healthcare class as they grew more and more pale as the doctor described all the lethal diseases of sub-Saharan Africa. All I know now is that there are few diseases that have other symptoms than diarrhoea, fewer and headaches, and you’ll die from almost all of them. Don’t go to Africa.

Weirdest research plan was a biologist who was going to research turtle shit, not as in “things about turtles” but turtle faeces. She’s going to the Galapagos Islands to feed thousands of tiny pearls to a dozen of turtles. Then she will collect all their poop every day, wash it and count how many pearls came out. This way she’ll find out the actual time it takes for food to go through the turtle’s digestive system, which will enable more accurate research into the turtles’ travels since you can match contents in the poop with local flora on various islands. So yes, she will be washing turtle shit for two months as her research.

Other than that my last days consisted mostly of panicky last minute preparations with vaccines, e-mails to various contact persons and discussions with my friend Lennart who had been to the same place in the Philippines at the beginning of this year.

Good things learned from the course: always lock your car door. Don’t hide valuables in your room. Get a wallet with 200 SEK in local currency to hand to robbers. Never ever go into sweet water. Largest killer for Swedes abroad is heart diseases, second biggest is traffic: never ever sit on a motorcycle abroad, and be more scared of traffic than anything else. Scan your passport and send it to yourself in an e-mail so you can show it even if you lose both passport and copies. And never go to Africa.

---

---