Susan Wardell
Ethnographers love to share food stories, especially awkward, confessional tales about the ‘horrors’ of the local cuisine. As we enter the field, through the simple (and yet so very enculturated) day to day act of eating we literally take the ‘other’ into our bodies. My time in Uganda, where I was conducting fieldwork for my PhD research on faith-based youth workers and wellbeing, was saturated with thoughts, worries, guilt, obligation, deception, conversation, and explanation about food.
On our first night in Uganda, fresh off the plane, the vivid, irrepressible Stephen Adundo Egesa (our host and key informant) took me and my husband to a dusty university canteen for dinner. We consulted the concise chalkboard menu and safely requested ‘Irish’ (potatoes) and beans. Slyly, Stephen added goat intestine stew to the list our waitress was making: “You have to eat Ugandan now, Dr Susie, Mr Andrew!” He watched our faces, grinning, while I fought to quell the roiling of my stomach as the sinewy stew was placed before us.
Most of us experience the death of a parent or grandparent and the loss of the past it brings. The death of an elderly family member, however, does not threaten the family’s reason to exist, and its future hopes and dreams remain. The death of a child, however, brings with it the death of part of the parents, and the psychological death of the family. In bereavement literature there is agreement that the death of a child is almost beyond the parents’ endurance. The parent-child bond is arguably the strongest bond there is. The concept of the child as an integral part of the parent’s self is logical in that the survival of the child depends on altruistic parenting. If mother and baby did not become strongly attached the baby would die. The purpose of attachment, therefore, is the survival of the species. Thus, parenthood is deeply challenged by the death of a child.
We can’t outspend them, so we’ll have to out-think them” – Emirates Team New Zealand boss, Grant Dalton