fieldwork in the Cape summer

I've seriously forgotten how hot it can be here in Cape Town - maybe it not the heat, maybe it more to do with moving around in that heat and of course the lack of air conditioning while moving around in that heat. The office where I work has sans air con - that's practically amounts to inhuman working conditions - I say that in a cheeky kind of Euro-centric tone, my newly acquired European sensibilities are starting to frame my impressions of Cape Town it would seem.

I'm finding that by 3pm I'm completely out of it - I cant think, I need to shower, I need to sleep...I cant seem to function for a full day - in one go that is. So I'm working at night, well I have no choice I need to catch up on the time I'm missing showering and sleeping in the afternoons. Was my life really like this before I left for England? Well I was working in a different office (which I saw today, actually, same pictures I put up still on the noticeboards, how really weird is that?) and I dealt with the heat differently then, and lets not forget I was living in a different home - big big difference. I've been pining, totally pining for my old flat recently - everything was 'better' and 'brighter' in Kenilworth - goodness I miss it so so much.

Fieldwork is still happening and still exciting and I'm grateful that I'm not an anthropologist because my fieldnotes activities and fieldwork disposition really leave much to be desired. I'm constantly evaluating my own performance in the field - mostly picking up all my mistakes and lack of gusto - to ask particular questions, to unashamedly take those photos, failing to remember verbatim some poignant point someone made, to write beautifully accurate yet descriptive fieldnotes...and the list goes on. So I'm grateful I don't see myself as that lone ethnographer painstakingly trying to capture the 'reality' of some community's lived experience. At times like these I am also grateful I'm the novice - so I'm allowed to make the mistakes and not do it RIGHT (whatever that means).

But having done my English inspired whinge I'm couldn't be happier to be in Cape Town in the blissful summer heat, sweating like a pig, doing a less than perfect job of fully capturing the lived experiences of students and staff in my research site and revelling in the fact that I'm a novice researcher.