August 14, 2025

I think the universal law of fieldwork is that you should expect things to go wrong. In fact, if everything has been going pretty well, the statistical probability of something going sideways is increasing by the day.

As we set off on Monday this week, my goals were clear. I had twenty interviews left to complete, and four full days to do it. Since the only challenges we had encountered to date were fairly pedestrian—we had made multiple replacements on our target list due to people moving out of the area or because our team had assigned an incorrect gender to the prospective participant—I was bracing for calamity that morning. And I didn’t have to wait long.

We had made a very early start, successfully cleared the central area of Kitisi village before foot traffic on the road picked up, and were bouncing down the dirt road to the next village at a good clip when the Land Cruiser softly spluttered and rolled to a heavy stop. It was like an old man had coughed and sank down languidly on the curb. I had checked all of the fluids that morning and knew instantly that this was something else. The fuel gauge hadn’t been working for weeks, so despite trying to keep my own tally of our diesel input and consumption, the balance of probability was that we had run the tank dry.

If you’ve been following along this summer, it probably goes without saying that you don’t just pull out an insurance card and call for roadside assistance here. Instead, you pull up the contact list in your phone and try to figure out how to leverage your network to reach a solution. I’ll save you the long version of the story and simply report that it ultimately took the mechanic from camp working on it for over an hour, a motorcycle taxi bringing fuel from the roadside shop in town twice, and five strong adults (me, my assistant, our local guide, and two motortaxi drivers we pressed into service) to push this beast of a vehicle back onto the comparatively level part of the road so the fuel would properly feed down the line, the priming pump would work, and it could be started.

No sooner had we gotten it rolling again than I found a huge thorn—the kind that had pierced my boot sole a couple weeks earlier—stuck into a tire sidewall. As I twisted it, I heard a hiss of air and quickly shoved it back hard. The mechanic seemed unphased by this development. He thought that it would probably hold until the end of our field day as long as we left the thorn in place, so with some trepidation, we finally rumbled off to our first interview almost two hours later than planned. 

I was keenly aware that we might not be able to complete the full list of interviews if anything else went wrong during the week. Which of course it did.

Disclaimer: I'm not a cinematographer. However, you can click on the videos above (and turn your volume up!) for a sense of what it's like to be winding through rural roads in the field truck or standing in the savannah on an afternoon in the dry season.

We pushed hard to make up the lost time on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I was exhausted, but we had only three interviews left for today. They were spread across two fairly distant village areas. However, we were building up a track record of completing six interviews per day even when we needed to travel widely, so this felt like a surmountable challenge. We might even be back to camp in time for lunch.

The first meeting was wonderful. The participant met us in the bush to help us find their boma, was enthusiastic and articulate in the interview, and even served us hot breakfast.

When we arrived at the second village and parked to wait for our local guide, it was only 9:40 am. Plenty of time. Yet as I watched the quarter hours slipping by with no sign of him, that gnawing concern in the back of my mind kept rising. What if something else goes wrong?

When he finally arrived and I was turning the key to start driving towards our second interview, I caught something in the Swahili dialogue between my research assistant and guide. “Wait, did you say it’s a woman?!” They both looked at me with surprise and confirmed that it was. “But our next two interviews are supposed to be men…”. A quick check of the list verified this, and I could see their spirits sinking. It wasn’t going to be a short day after all.

In the end, we had to detour back to camp to consult the full list of potential interview participants from the earlier survey study. There was only one male contact left for that ethnic group. My stomach sank when I saw that he lived in the sub-village that was furthest from us. And when we tried to reach him, his cell phone was switched off. 

I decided to put a pin in that minor crisis to try to catch our third participant of the day before we lost him too. This involved a long (long, long) ramble in search of a moving target that required all of the collective knowledge that our guide and two other pastoralists that we picked up along the road had of this area. It also required multiple cell phone calls where the only directional landmarks appeared to be dry rice paddies and a creekline, which leaves a lot to be desired when you’re trying to pinpoint an exact position in the middle of many hectares of rice paddies bordered by creeklines. But we did eventually meet along one of those creeks, and completed the interview under the curious eyes of a troop of vervet monkeys.

By the time we had re-crossed two creeks and multiple farm areas on foot, reached the field truck, and were starting to pick our way through narrow, brushy trails back towards the main road, the human network of the villages had worked its magic again. Somehow, another contact of our guide had located the man with his cell phone off. He was in a community meeting at a neighboring village—the village we happened to be driving towards.

As another pleasant surprise, I only had to navigate down a (comparatively) short stretch of rocky, steepish hillside that my guide seemed to believe was a road before he told me to park in a clearing. There were no buildings, no signs of life, and certainly no signs of anything resembling a meeting place. Yet the man quietly emerged from the trees near us a few minutes later. We all perched precariously on some termite-infested logs and had a very nice interview. 

At any other point in my life, I would have been full of questions about how this mysterious tryst in an unmapped location came to be, but I must admit that I was far too relieved to care today. This is simply how you get things done in rural Tanzania.

To join me on this journey, you can follow along with new posts in the Field Notes blog on this website or LinkedIn. My work is partially supported by the Center for Human-Carnivore Coexistence and the Salerno Lab. 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.