Criterios para la organización de los Espacios Educativos 116

I left Malawi a few weeks after Lency’s disclosure, as scheduled, having completed nine months of fieldwork. Back in New Zealand I began working through the mountain of data that I had amassed. Analysing the orphans’ data involved reading stories, listening to songs, studying a picture, watching dance and drama videos, as well as examining interview transcripts. I had previously enlisted my translator’s assistance in interpreting Malawian body language for the analysis of the dances. Nonetheless, in addition to struggling with the problem of representation in terms of temporal and spatial distance between the ‘observing’, and the ‘analysing and writing’, I continued to grapple with the power imbalance between me as the researcher and the orphans as my participants. I had been trying to position myself as their equal, ‘a fellow orphan’ but my skin colour was a potent symbol of power and prosperity from which, inevitably, I was unable to escape.

One night with all the typed transcripts of the orphans’ stories, poems, plays and dances as well as a photo of the drawing spread across the floor, inspired by their creativity, I wrote a composite poem encompassing their expressed sentiments and where possible their actual words. In reflexive critique I wondered if this could be construed as being my construction or my representation of the orphans’ stories, but then reminded myself that all

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ethnography is representation and the ethnographer is always in a powerful position in relation to the participants by being able to choose what to include and what to leave out. Nevertheless, ethnographers reflexively ‘write themselves in’, acknowledging their own position in relation to their participants rather than “writing as disembodied omniscient narrators claiming universal and atemporal general knowledge” (Richardson & Adams St. Pierre, 2008, p. 476). I was encouraged to include my poem by the emergence of a new approach of producing ethnographies through “creative analytical practices” which include poetry. Furthermore, I concur with Laurel Richardson (2008) in rejecting as “dinosaurian”, notions that ‘creative’ and ‘analytical’ are “contradictory and incompatible” (Richardson & Adams St. Pierre, 2008, p. 477). Writing the poem helped me to feel closer to the orphans’ stories and gain a deeper understanding. In addition to engaging with their work cerebrally, I connected with their stories emotionally.

During the process of transcribing interviews, analysing the survey data and analysing the very rich data generated by the orphans, I found a pattern emerging: the orphans who were in the most difficult situations were from interlineage marriages. It appeared that children of a matrilineal father and a patrilineal mother were particularly vulnerable when orphaned, as neither their father's nor their mother's extended families seem to regard the children as belonging to their group. Finding out why this should be became the main focus of my research.

My strategy for my second period of fieldwork was to elicit life history narratives pertaining to interlineage marriages between matrilineal men and patrilineal women in order to explore if and why children from these marriages are likely to be rendered particularly vulnerable when orphaned. I identified four main cases to investigate during my second period of fieldwork and planned to visit the people concerned to hear a variety of perspectives. In addition, I wanted to talk to other patrilineal women living in Mapira who were married to matrilineal men, about their marriages and families as well as

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patrilineal women married to patrilineal men. I was able to identify the women that I wanted to interview through my household survey data. However, while I was preparing for my return to Malawi, I was contacted by Mr Bwanali who told me about a dispute in Mapira. It appeared that the committee that I had worked with in Mapira had fallen out of favour with Chief Ndaba.

I heard that Chief Ndaba had dissolved the Mapira orphan care committee and had held new elections in the community ensuring the old committee members could not be re-elected. I had heard that since the new committee had taken over, they had allowed the orphan care building to be used for drinking parties in the evenings, which had resulted in the property being damaged. I wondered if I would be able to continue with my research under such conditions. I planned to speak to representatives from both the old and new committees, as well as the Chief, to try to get an understanding of what had happened. I would have preferred to continue working with the people from the previous committee as I had already developed good working relationships with them, but I was keenly aware that I needed the Chief’s approval to work in the community. Again, Scheper-Hughes’ (1995) words about ethnographers being drawn unwillingly into situations were echoing in my ears. Trying to remain positive, however, I thought that the dispute might provide new insights on community-based orphan-care.