In terms of planning the fieldwork, a few challenges occurred. One was that it was difficult for me to know exactly who and how many I would need to interview, due to the method I now was using. However, as a start I knew it would be relevant for me to talk with some of the adolescent girls participating in the project to get their experiences. I also said talking to some parents would be interesting. Additionally, it would be good to have variation in terms of marital status, education level, religion, caste and so forth. I was told that this would be no problem to arrange. The central office in Kathmandu explained that the districts they were based in were culturally very different. Thus, it would be interesting for me to visit two of them to experience this difference. We agreed that two field stays would be feasible for me and started planning the practicalities. My stay in the districts had to be coordinated according to the capacity of the local partners. I was very explicit about not wanting to be in the way, and that I was flexible and could adapt according to their time and activities. All decisions regarding the field stays were taken in close collaboration with both the central SF office and the local partners. My fieldwork consisted of five phases in the end, described below.
Phase one: introduction
The first phase consisted of five days and revolved around settling down, introducing myself to the SF staff, familiarising myself with the project and plan the field stays.
Phase two: the first field stay
At the time I was there, mid-term evaluations of the project was going on. Because of this the project coordinator was going with an external evaluation team to Surkhet district, and they organised for me and my interpreter to join them. That way he could introduce me to the local partners and I could observe the evaluations before starting my interviews.
We arrived on a Friday and the first week-end I only observed the evaluations and joined the team for meetings with partner NGOs, the village development committee, project participants, parents and local schools. The programme was very tight and we did not spend much time with each group of informants. However, it gave me an overview of the project, who was involved and some personal stories from the adolescent girls we met. When the week-end was over, the evaluation team and project coordinator returned to Kathmandu and I remained in Surkhet with my interpreter. We arranged with one of the local partners, SAC, to go into the village and stay
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for a few days to interview some of the girls. Unfortunately, I got sick and the village stay got postponed, but only for one day. Then we spent four days in the village, where we lived with a local family, before we returned to the city area of Surkhet.
Originally, we had talked about visiting another village after this where the second local partner, KIRDARC, had SAMVAD centres. However, we figured out it would require one day of
travelling from the city area to get there, and another to return. I concluded that this would be too much time spent only on travelling, and wanted to talk more with some of the girls we had met during the evaluations. I already had some background information on them and some of their experiences, but I wanted to follow up with some more questions. By now we had only done interviews with girls involved in SAMVAD, and SAMVAD played different roles in their experiences. If it was possible I wanted to talk with some girls external to SAMVAD to see what their experiences in relation to child marriage was. The local partner managed to arrange a group interview with four girls. We ended up spending two days in the city area, before we took the seventeen-hour long night bus ride back to Kathmandu. Altogether, we spent ten days in Surkhet.
Phase three: debrief
I planned to stay one week back in Kathmandu, resting up, transcribing and getting an overview of what I had so far. During this phase we also planned my second field stay. Before I came to Nepal, the SF office in Kathmandu had chosen Kapilvastu district as a suitable place for me to conduct research. However, I was informed upon arriving that the security situation in
Kapilvastu was fragile due to the blockade of the Indian border. Therefore, Bara, a different district had been chosen as an alternative. The project coordinator had worked on getting hold of a local interpreter and organising my stay while I was in Surkhet. Unfortunately, the security situation in Bara worsened while I was back in Kathmandu. Again they made the decision to cancel this trip and send me to Kapilvastu instead, where things now seemed to be safer. Due to this, my second field stay got postponed two days.
Phase four: the second field stay
I spent six days in Kapilvastu. I had a meeting with the local partner upon arriving, where we discussed my research and who I wanted to interview. With the experience I had gained from my previous field stay in Surkhet, I now had a better idea of what to do. However, I kept in mind that this was a different setting and that the experiences would probably also be different. I could
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not simply follow the leads from my interviews in Surkhet. To be true to the method, I wanted to start with an account of the girl’s experiences here as well. I quickly understood that the customs here were quite different, the actualities could even differ from one village to the other within the same area.
In Kapilvastu we were a team of four travelling around to the villages together. Two boys from the local partner, with good connections in the villages, drove me and my interpreter around on motorbikes. The first day was mostly introduction and planning. The four following days we visited villages and conducted interviews. I also met with the whole staff of the local partner. My three new friends wanted to show me around in the area, so we went sightseeing in the
afternoons. The last day the local partner was arranging a girl’s animator training. This would go on for ten days, and I joined them for the opening day and met the girls who would be animators at the different SAMVAD centres this year. I did not do any interviews, but observed the training and talked with the girls and local partner staff during breaks.
Phase five: finishing up
The last phase consisted of finishing up and saying good bye. I had five days left for this. I made sure I had all the documents I thought would be relevant for my analysis, such as project
descriptions, statistics and the mid-term evaluation report. By now it was also very interesting to discuss some of my findings with the staff, although my head was full of information and impressions I had not managed to sort out properly yet.