August 13, 2026

On Wednesday at 7:25am I found myself perched on a bench seat in a converted minivan with 22 other humans—a new record for this vehicle class in my experience of working in Africa. 

And when I say perched, I mean my knees were pulled up in front of me with my calves and feet contorted oddly under the bench. My right shoulder was shifted forward to make space for the Bibi (grandmother) huddled to one side of me, and the teenager on my other side was fully leaning onto my left shoulder, arm, and thigh. In his defense, he didn’t actually have a seat; he was instructed to balance on a woven feed sack stood on its end that was being shipped to the next market town. Three people were standing hunched over under the low roof. Some drivers are just greedy like this, but with no public transportation options on this rural route, we sometimes have no other affordable options for transit between regional and district capitals where I need to ferry (and request) letters of introduction.*

This could be filed under “the skills they don’t tell you you’ll need in field research.” Many people associate being a researcher in Africa with something along the lines of driving a 4x4, carrying binoculars and a backpack, following local guides down winding trails, or sitting around the gathering tree in a village with community members. And if that’s your mental image, it’s not entirely wrong. It can be all of those things at times. But in reality, it is also a lot of unseen, unglamorous work.

For instance, nobody tells you that you’ll spend weeks every year applying for government permits. Then you’ll spend days showing up to government offices to push things forward, working through your in-country social network to get contact information for government staff, or following up with calls and messages to facilitate processing and coordinate pick-up. You’ll need social skills to build trusted relationships in-country for this, or you'll need to hire research team members who have connections. You’ll need the cultural awareness to know just how much of a pest you can be, and when you need to wait patiently and trust your contacts to be looking after your interests at their own pace. 

Nobody teaches you how to pack a “capsule” that extends far beyond clothing. Yes, you might need to make outfit choices that can allow you to meet a government official in the morning, pack your life into a duffel bag and backpack at hotel checkout time, carry all of it down a dirt road in the afternoon, and hop on a four-hour bus ride to another city. But you’ll also need to strike a critical balance between being prepared for any situation (redundancies in gear, tech, water filtration, medications, etc.) and being physically capable of carrying your kit around on your back for some distance when needed. There’s an art to packing just enough things that you can come up with a way to function in any hotel room, lodge or tent you find yourself kipping in, but also knowing what you trust yourself to rig up on the fly with materials you are likely to be able to find where you stay.

Fieldwork also demands rigorous planning, but extreme flexibility. Like spending days you had planned to be heading towards your field site bouncing between check-ins at a government office, data analysis at a hotel, and washing laundry in the bathroom sink (ahem, Monday). You might hear nothing for hours, then have to drop everything you’re doing to print two pieces of paper that a contact sent you over WhatsApp and race back to the government office with them... only to return to the hotel and wait again.

And on the subject of flexibility, you can't fully grasp the audacity we have to expect electricity to flow at the flip of a switch until you've worked somewhere where having power is a fragile state. Murphy’s Law of Fieldwork is if there’s a “worst” time for a grid to go down, a transformer to blow up, or a solar system battery to run dry, that is when it will do it. 

And unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened when our crowded minivan finally reached the district capital this Wednesday. A grid shutdown affecting six regions of the country, including the one I was in. Government operations ground to a halt.

So no, I didn’t get my letter of introduction that day. Instead, my research assistant and I met with wildlife officers to get updated information on villages reporting conflicts with large carnivores. Then we piled back onto another bus to return to the hotel. It would be another day of waiting, follow-up calls, meetings, and logistical planning. But when we were finally notified that the letter was ready the following morning, we were prepared to make the most of the remaining time. 

Over the next seven days, we'll be traveling to some of the most remote communities fringing the massive complex of protected lands anchored by Ruaha National Park (estimated at around 18,000 square miles in total). There, we'll request the opportunity to interview village leaders about their communities' experiences of conflict with large carnivores. These are communities we believe to be unserved or underserved by NGOs, yet facing serious challenges to coexistence with ecologically and economically important species like lion, leopard, hyena, and wild dog. These large carnivores range across wide areas in source of prey, water, and mates, often taking them outside protected area boundaries and into adjacent farms and grazing lands. My work this year will help to identify a handful of high-conflict areas to begin a new research effort in for 2027 and beyond. 

*Context Note: In Tanzania, researchers need multiple types of national permits and approvals to work in-country. One of these processes involves requesting a letter of introduction from the national TAMISEMI Office to each Region of the country you're working in, then requesting a letter from the Region(s) to the District(s), and from the District(s) to the Ward(s) and/or Village government(s). Each of these letters typically has to be requested and later picked up in-person then carried in hard copy to the next-level office to ensure timely processing. 

To join me on this journey, you can follow along with new posts in the Field Notes blog on this website or LinkedIn. I am in Tanzania on a Critical Language Scholarship for Summer 2026. My research is currently supported by the Center for Human-Carnivore Coexistence, a P.E.O. Scholar Award, and a Center for Collaborative Conservation Fellowship. I am actively fundraising for the next phase of my research, and welcome referrals to funders who are interested in supporting work on global challenges including human-wildlife conflict, poverty alleviation, biodiversity conservation, and the impacts of a changing climate on all of these issues.

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