Moments of Sharing: Fieldwork in Ethiopia (1988–2008)

In this chapter, I recount two fieldwork periods in Ethiopia. In the first, I evaluate the educational component of a Swedish-supported water project in rural Ethiopia where, quite unusually, local women were trained to carry out and manage the project. In the second, I focus on the Ethiopian government’s then-new gender-educational policy and the views of students and teachers at a large urban teacher’s college toward the policy. My goal here is to determine how the policy was understood and applied—or not applied—in the college. In both, my involvement in person-to-person relationships became quintessential sources of knowledge; I constantly encountered a broad plethora of opinions, explanations, and personal recollections of meaning-filled incidents. Only with all of these in mind did my diligent perusal of additional sources—comparative studies, academic articles, and statistics—make sense.