After spending just over a week in Morogoro, it was time for me to travel yet again…to Kibaoni! My host and fellow Morally Contested Conservation member, Salum Kulunge, accompanied me on a 12-hour bus ride across Tanzania, stopping for one night at Arusha and then completing our journey to this small rural town that would become our home for the next two weeks. 

Upon settling into our accommodations on the outskirts of Tarangire National Park, I was especially excited to finally meet my initial three research assistants: Ashraph, Lomnyiaki, and Sangau. As a team, we visited the Burunge Wildlife Management Area (WMA) office and the chairmen of Minjingu, Olasiti, and Mwada (three villages in the Burunge WMA) to obtain their permission to administer my questionnaire. Cleared by Cornell’s Institutional Review Board (IRB), my questionnaire followed up on my 2023 research on the interconnectedness of climate change and human-wildlife conflicts. Now able to apply my previous findings in a practical setting, I aimed to understand people’s past experiences and future predictions of human-wildlife conflicts (such as crop and livestock losses to wild animals) and climate change (such as long-term changes in temperature and rainfall). Though we have now completed data collection, I plan to return to the Burunge WMA next year to report my results to the village chairmen, local residents, and leaders of the African Wildlife Foundation and World Wildlife Fund to help inform decisions about wildlife conservation and rural livelihoods.   

The first lesson I learned while undertaking this project was deceptively complex: Identity is everything. It was only when I finally began fieldwork that I became acutely aware that I was, for the majority of my time in the field, the only woman on my team and the only Indian American Swahili-speaker that anyone here had ever met. My intersectional identity understandably drew a lot of attention from people living in areas that are entirely devoid of tourists. While I generally don’t recoil from attention, I initially struggled to navigate its consequences. One evening, a male hotel employee cornered me in my room and forced me to give him my phone number, refusing to leave until I proved that I had received his messages. Meanwhile, each day in the field, several men ranging from the ages of 20 to 70 would ask me to marry them or ask my three older male assistants for their permission to marry me. Situations like these, while flattering, often left me in a state of paranoia. How could I respond without sounding offensive or brazen? And how would people respond to me if I declined their offers? Cracking a joke in response, I quickly learned, was the easiest escape from conversations that I can only describe as…well, flustering, to say the least.

Nonetheless, the generosity of the residents of all three villages was overwhelming. My ability to communicate with villagers in Swahili (and a little Maasai) broke the third wall between us: I would sit with them on plastic chairs or water jugs while chatting about our upbringings and marveling at the similarities between our cultures. One elderly woman introduced me to the meticulous craft of weaving baskets out of palm leaves, while another rested with me on a bench outside of her traditional boma and taught me ten new words in Maasai. Of the over 300 people with whom we spoke, many others welcomed us into their homes for tea and sent us away with peanuts, corn, or leafy greens that they had cultivated themselves. Two mothers, Mama Ahmed and Mama Joshua, even invited our entire team to their home for a delicious lunch of cooked pigeon peas, cassava leaves, and rice after Salum and I had helped them remove newly-harvested pigeon peas from their pods — the most touching (and delicious!) way to share their labor of love.

The participants’ thoughtfulness did not stop with their hospitality. Apart from answering my questions, many of them openly shared with me the challenges of living alongside wildlife, such as having to sleep on farms at night to scare away elephants or scatter their fields with plastic bags to deter zebras. Some villagers showed me the extensive damage that hyenas had caused to livestock enclosures, and others let me examine the piles of maize that they had harvested prematurely to prevent consumption by zebras or monkeys. To learn about these issues while doing my summer 2023 research at Cornell had been informative, but to see these challenges in real life and actually speak to the people experiencing them was eye-opening. My frustration after hearing about the alarming frequency of crop and livestock losses was mirrored by an immense admiration for the villagers themselves, who continued to beam and banter despite the formidable challenges they were (and are) experiencing. Their attitude was infectious, and I hope to approach my own life with even a fraction of their resilience.

And that forms the cornerstone of my fieldwork takeaways: While fieldwork can often be frustrating, confusing, or tiring, it is the people who make it worthwhile. It took several hours for Lomnyiaki, Sangau, Ashraph, Salum, and I to translate my questionnaire from Swahili back into English to double check the meanings of the questions — a task that, while daunting, went by quickly because we would pause for chuckles while munching on cashews and papayas. Several weeks after our fieldwork has ended, we still joke about the cold shower I took at our hotel in Arusha because I didn’t see the switch for hot water, or about how quickly we all tired of eating beans with every meal, or even about how miserably I failed to chew nyama choma (grilled goat meat) during our final meal as a team while everyone else ate it with ease. We all challenged each other linguistically as well, speaking primarily in Swahili and teaching each other bits and pieces of Maasai and Marathi during long car rides. Like all of my interactions in Tanzania thus far, my linguistic experience was as immersive as it gets.

Once again, I am incredibly thankful for all of the people who surrounded me during my time in the field: Chef Jessica, who cooked the most delicious breakfast, lunch, and dinner for our team every day and whose flaky chapatis I still miss; Singoyi, who managed our accommodations in Kibaoni and joined us many times in our late night laughter; Noela and Assu, who drove nearly two hours to our accommodations to help us set up our Internet so that we could prepare for fieldwork; Darragh and Lovemore, two of my mentors who provided guidance and moral and support from afar; and Luseko, Jackson, Andrew, Nicholas and John, our five village assistants who oriented us in the three villages and introduced us to each questionnaire participant. I also would be remiss not to shout out Irene, who assisted me for my final two days of fieldwork and quickly became like an older sister with whom I could share some of the quirks of being a female conservation researcher. Though she wasn’t with us for very long, I am so grateful to have met her and hope to work with her again!

And so, to Ashraph, Lomnyiaki, Sangau, Irene, and Salum: Asanteni for still finding a way to laugh after spending long days together in the field, for encouraging me to greet every person I met in Maasai or Swahili, and for enabling me to do fieldwork with full force for the very first time in this very new place. All of them have become lifelong mentors and friends, and part of the reason why I will miss my time in Tanzania more than I could have possibly imagined.