My Project: What and Why.
I arrived in Niamey on Monday, officially beginning a year of anthropological fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation. While any seasoned anthropologist will tell you that the project you carefully craft for innumerable grant applications, presentations, and proposals will almost certainly not be the project you conduct (ask any anthropologist about not so pleasant surprises once on the ground, like finding that one’s research question is no longer locally relevant, or one’s intended research protocol has become no longer safe, or one’s site shockingly no longer exists) – still, even if only to maintain one’s sanity and sense of purpose, it is important to cling to it. So cling I will.
My project focuses on processes of de-stigmatization following repair surgeries for obstetric fistula in rural Niger (pronounced Neee-j’air here, and frequently N’eye-jer in the U.S.). Fistula is an injury sustained during prolonged and obstructed labor, leaving women chronically incontinent (and ostensibly shamed and socially dismembered). Obstetric fistula is virtually non-existent in Industrialized countries; however, there is an estimated 2-3.5 million women who live with fistula in developing countries (the majority of whom live in Sub Saharan Africa). Thanks to the efforts of people like Nick Kristof of the New York Times and books like “Cutting for Stone” (and countless nonprofit and health professionals who have dedicated their lives raising consciousness about the issue), fistula has recently gained international attention as a devastating and stigmatizing childbirth injury that disproportionately affects the most marginalized girls and women: the young, rural, uneducated, poor, and largely disempowered. Although fistula repair surgeries are becoming more widely available in Sub Saharan Africa, there have been almost no post-surgical follow-up studies. This is probably because the women who are most likely to get fistula are rural or otherwise hard to access (as being far from emergency obstetric care like caesarian sections or forceps delivery, or being unable to access care due to restricted decision making power, place women at risk for fistula in the first place). So, follow-up has proven costly and time consuming for clinicians, social workers, and social scientists. As a result, little is know about how effective surgery is at actually closing fistulas in the long term, and even less is know about how women’s lives are changed following repair surgeries. Does the stigma go away? Are women re-embraced by their family, friends and communities? More or less, this is what I will be studying, interviewing women with fistula at repair clinics and following them home for periodic follow-up interviews over the course of one year. I’ll be working in and around Maradi – a notoriously conservative Muslim city in southern Niger, close to the Nigerian border.
For now, I am in Niger’s capital, Niamey working to get in-country research approval before I can actually begin my research. This process in unsurprisingly opaque – regulations are constantly shifting without any mechanism to deliver the correct information or clear protocols. As I type this, I am currently sitting in an office (and have been for the last hour and a half) waiting for 12 copies of my proposal to be bound (a requirement which, while not written, is considered “common sense” here).
