Electric Fence Zine: Mauritius

After three separate research calamities in three days, my Fulbright project is barely registering a pulse. This is frustrating because, in spite of the long technical name for my study, ("a triangulated QUAL (quan) mixed-methods study"), its research methodology is surprisingly straightforward.

Voilà la recette:
1/2 part survey research + 1/2 part interview research = case study on Sub-Saharan garment manufacture that I can lug to a Masters program or deposit on the doorstep of an academic publication.

So far, I have interviewed general managers from 5 different garment companies and administered surveys to workers from 2 of those 5 factories (60 workers total, 30 from each). According to my research design, I am supposed to survey workers from every factory where I interview management. In addition, I am setting up interviews with government officials, industry people and anyone else who is willing to speak with me.

Which naturally leads to two age-old questions.

Question 1: Why Mauritius?
Answer: Because Mauritius is one of the three largest garment exporters in Sub Saharan Africa-- the others being South Africa and Lesotho.

Question 2: Why QUAL (quan) research?
Answers: Because qualitative research is my labor of love for myriad reasons ... the most important ones being my appreciation for QUAL research's depth, richness and explanatory power, and my interest in discourse, narratives and sensemaking -- which is to say the ways in which people process and perceive certain aspects of the world around them.

The second reason that I am doing a Qual(quan) study is that quantitative research suits my topic of study as well as the amount of time I am spending here (ten months). A 10-month research project based solely on interviews would become unmanageable, FAST. During the 2 months I spent researching my senior thesis in Kenya, I conducted a total of 55 interviews with garment workers. Multiply that by 5 to reflect the Fulbright grant period and you're pushing 300. Can you imagine transcribing, coding and analyzing 300+ interviews?? Not only would a task of such magnitude be near-impossible based on my experiences (i.e. taking the better part of eight months to transcribe all of my interviews from Kenya), my data would be redundant.

Survey research, on the other hand, is great for large n-size studies and allows researchers to speak somewhat authoritatively about patterns and trends... provided that their sample population is representative and their survey method is sound/reliable.

Usher in problem one.. unreliable surveys with unrepresentative samples.

Up until now, I have administered surveys to workers of my choosing over their lunch breaks, with management permission but no interference or oversight. Today, however, when I went to administer surveys to workers at Company 123, the management informed me that they would select my participants, bring them to me and supervise the exercise.

While these stipulations alone were alarming, things actually went South from there. The downward slope began when managers started reading my survey to workers aloud, presumably to help them translate from questions from French to Creole (more widely spoken, understood). With in minutes, this evolved into veritable coaching -- first by gesturing towards answers they thought workers should choose, and second by exclusively reading out loud answer choices that boded well for the company (i.e. the responses "very satisfied" and "rather satisfied" on my question regarding worker's level of satisfaction with the textile industry as a whole).

In addition, over what were easily the worst ten minutes I've endured in my brief-stint as a researcher, I also watched a supervisor more or less answer every single question on a female worker's survey. My Mauritian research assistant told me after the fact that he doubted the woman knew a word of French (perhaps making her an Indian migrant worker?). It's probably no surprise then that her survey was the first survey out of sixty that rated its level of job satisfaction as "trés satisfait."

In an interesting turn, my first-time research assistant ran his own type of interference-- for instance, instructing respondents to answer questions differently than I had advised them in the past (i.e. dependents = # of adults and children not working in your household, verses dependents = # of adults and children who you support financially) and urging workers out of the earshot of management to check "pas satisfait du tout " on their surveys...
Quel catastrophe!

My survey is quickly turning into what every survey researcher fears most -- a never-ending pre-test. With all of the irregularities I observed, I don't know whether I should exclude certain questions from tabulation (job satisfaction, dependents), or exclude the entire pile of surveys.

Chagrin and embarrassment aside, let me take a moment to excoriate the buyers who gauge the social compliance of garment producing firms solely by conducting on site interviews with workers. Seeing how it took me all of one day to see how unreliable the process is, shame on you! Your investigatory methods are negligent and irresponsible...

My other research-related calamities of the week come on the qualitative research front.. which is sad because open-ended interviews are "anything goes" by nature. Screwing up an interview takes a rare kind of talent, and unfortunately it seems to be a talent that I am blessed with.

First off, one of this week's interviewees refused to let me make an audio recording of his statements. Thus, instead of a verbatim transcription, the only document that I will have of our 1 1/2 hour interview are three pages of barely-legible notes in shorthand.

Secondly, said interviewee was not a GM but a human resources manager. Not only did this break with my research design, it prevented me from obtaining basic financial information on the firm... i.e. percentage of export devoted to the US, EU, and Mauritius; changes to production following the
MFA-expiry, etc.

Finally, in the most amusing of my week's research disasters, my interviewee showed up late to our appointment and I was forced to cram an interview designed to take 30-45 minutes into a ten-minute timespan. On top of that, my interviewee commandeered my interview schedule, read the questions to himself, and then answered them aloud. Self-administered surveys are one thing, but self-administered interviews?.. Come on! Then, to make things even more interesting, at the end of our ten-minute session I was offered an internship at his company (!?!?).

And thus ends my comedy of (methodological) errors. If living and working in Mauritius has taught me anything, it’s that laughter is potent medicine. Nonetheless, I'm not sure that even laughter rectifies funky research. My only hope is that after this week's disastrous stint in the field, I'll have serious data-collection-karma in my bank account come February...

Labels: research

Posted by east of madagascar at 9:15 PM | Permalink | Comments

More sad, sobering news about police conduct with victims of sexual assault. However, this time, the story is out of the US, not Mauritius... fodder for my next post, which will be a consideration of the shortcoming involved in indicting culture when it comes to assault/rape.

According to the Tampa Tribune, a 21 year old woman was arrested after reporting her rape to the police. Why? Because she had a misdemeanor on her criminal record, dating back 4 years.

To make matters worse, the orderly on duty at the holding center refused to dispense emergency contraception to the rape victim because of her so-called religious convictions..

I wish I could say that I these events were impossible for me to fathom. However, in the end, this is just another testament to the ways in which police fail in their mandate to serve and protect women.

Note to the rape victim:
My deepest regret and sincerest apologies. If your case doesn't get heard before 2010, I volunteer to take it up for free. We can carry this all the way to the Appellate Courts.

Note to the Nurse:
Given your concern for the well-being of blastocysts, I suggest you offer your womb as a surrogate host for the undifferentiated cell mass for whom you staged an intervention.

Although science hasn't worked out all of the logistics of such a procedure, just imagine the possibilities -- a pro-life movement stripped of its most glaringly absurd propositions regarding women's rights and choice..

Thanks to angrybrownbutch for the story.

Labels: women's issues

Posted by east of madagascar at 1:56 AM | Permalink | Comments

My first three months in Mauritius have been a crash course in Hindu Male Privilege, 101.

Men in Mauritius, particularly Hindu men, feel enormous amounts of entitlement when it comes to their treatment of women. As a Black woman, my experience has been all the more acute.. scarcely a day goes by when men aren't honking, whistling, staring at me or otherwise carrying on. Doesn't sound too bad? Nothing truly out of the ordinary? Well, try being followed all the way home from the marketplace by married men who are desperate to have a chance with you...

Or, even better, having doctors in fancy cars corner you on the side of the road and essentially proposition you for sex, on grounds that you remind them of a Black women they screwed 20 years ago in the UK, all while offering to give you a free medical exam. And then imagine said lecherous doctor coming back to your neighborhood several days later to scour the block in search of you/your address/the place they last saw you. EEEEK. (Thank God for roommates who lay down the law and scare the creeps away..)

anyhow.. get the picture?

Well, I thought I did... Which is to say, I thought my aforementioned encounters with Mauritian men had shown me the full extent of the sexual harassment that takes place here in Mauritius.

Sadly, however, I stand corrected. As it turns out, sexual harassment in Mauritius has an even more sinister face.

First off, there is the Hindu man who dropped his trousers on me at a club. In previous blog posts and in conversations with friends, I have tried hard to find humor in the situation and turn the whole debacle into a joke. However, the fact remains that the encounter was a huge unnerving mess. If you have never had someone expose themselves to you and say"Je veux vraiment de te baiser" and "Descends" in the dark recesses of a club, I truly hope you never live to see that day. I was so revolted by the experience, I seriously wanted to scrub out my ears and jab out my eyes.

I wish that I had the presence of mind to cuss out the mec in French and English as things were unfolding, but instead all I managed was a meek Bonne Nuit before grabbing my friend Jason and fleeing the club on foot. However, I guess it's better late than never... Vijay, if you're reading this out there in internet land, va te faire foutre.

Fast forward to this week, Monday. It is 4:40pm and I am sitting on a bus, making what is usually a tranquil ten minute trip from my host NGO to the Tae Kwon Do class I began a month ago. One other passenger is on the bus, and she gets off one stop after I get on, leaving me, the driver and the conductor (person who sells tickets to passengers). Seeing that I am alone, the bus conductor crosses the aisle and sits in the seat across from me. From there, he begins addressing me in French and asking me personal questions.. "Am I married?" "Do I have a boyfriend, and am I looking for one?" Do I want to get married in Mauritius?"

Assessing the situation, I take the man's flirtation to be indication that he is another one of Mauritius's typical lecherous curmudgeons. Wrong. As it turns out, a better way to describe this man is an "old, married, snaggletoothed molester"... because before a minute of conversation passes, said gentlemen has begun reaching over the aisle, stroking my thighs and trying to grope my privates.

Dumbfounded, I try to force the guy's hands away using my arms, as well as a water bottle that I'm wielding like a piece of armor. However, the assault continues, with his hands ever-so-persistently divebombing the crotch of my pants. At this point, my head is spinning, and I leap up from my seat and try to move as far away from him as physically possible.. which leaves me pressed against the window of the bus. However, my aggressor responds by tugging my waist and urging me to sit back down. Pretty soon, we’re both standing and he has me cornered against the window.

At this point, despite the fact that the bus is going full throttle, I try and squeeze past my aggressor and make my way for the door. From there, it's utter chaos. My aggressor starts hollering at the bus driver to keep on driving and essentially hold me hostage on the bus-- all the while grabbing my buttocks and telling me vulgar things. In the end, I basically leaped off the bus when it approached its next bus stop, with the conductor following me all the way to the door.

Suffice it to say, I arrived at Tae Kwon Do shell shocked. I didn't really speak to anyone until after the class ended, and when I finally broke my silence I confided in a colleague from work. Upon hearing my story, he insisted that we drive to the nearest police station and file a report.

To my chagrin, the first question I am asked when I sit down before the on-duty officer is, "what were you wearing when this happened?" -- which is unforgivable for reasons that are hopefully obvious (a little blaming the victim, anyone?).

After that grave misstep, however, the police officer asked me to give a full account of what happened, so I spent the better part of an hour recounting the events as he paraphrased them. However, his transcription took liberties with my testimony and featured several undesired flourishes, for instance, statements like "He touched my privates and I felt very embarrassed," and "I have no witnesses." In the end, I got the former changed to "He touched my privates and I felt violated," but the officer kept the latter as is.. despite my arguments that the bus driver witnessed the whole thing and was also somewhat complicit.

Anyhow, while I can say nothing for the Mauritian Police Force's feminist sensitivity training, I left the station believing that they at least had some semblance of professionalism. According to the officer I spoke with, my case would be investigated as a criminal case and I would eventually be called to testify against my assailant in court.

Sadly, however, I was proved wrong yet again. It all started yesterday night, when I received a flirtatious SMS from a telephone number that I did not recognize. The message read: Salut ma belle. Je veux etre amis (Hello my beautiful, I want to be *friends/lovers-- meaning sort of unclear given the context). To which i responded Qui est ce? Je n'identifie pas ce numero (Who is this? I don't recongize this number...)

In response, I receive another message saying "This is Ryan. I'm 25 years old, blah blah blah (insert some French dribble here)" At this point my mind is spinning because I don't know anyone named Ryan, and I can’t understand for the life of me how someone randomly got my cell number. However, it’s late and I'm tired so I simply ignored the message and go to bed.

However, this strategy is less than successful, because come morning I have several new messages from the mystery caller in my inbox, essentially saying "hello beautiful, why didn't you write back, and why are you being so méchante (mean, cruel)..presumably for not writing.

Owning to the fact that I'm as confused as I am disturbed, I write my mystery caller a follow up message asking: Où avons-nous rencontré? Et comment as-tu trouvé mon numero? (Where did we meet? And how did you find my number?) … To which the guy responds in Creole: "No we haven't met, I just saw you in town. I will tell you how I found your number later . Are you married?"

At this point I'm infuriated, so I write the French equivalent of "No, tell me how the hell you got my number, or stop effing contacting me!", to which I receive the following response:

Ok alors, suis policier ok si je ta v enuirais ok tu mexkuz si tu v pas ke nu soyons amis bn 2soler mai jaimeria bien etre amis ok alor a toi maintenant

Between the text message slang and the Creole and the who knows what, I won't even attempt a 1-1 translation of that message. However, in short, my text message stalker revealed himself to be one of the policemen who handled my sexual harassment case, and who apparently, helped himself to the number I left on file.

Honestly, I'm floored. Absolutely floored. In essence, it’s why I decided to rant in my blog tonight. Most of the time when I write about Mauritius, I try and dwell on all the positives because I ultimately feel fortunate to be here.

However, the fact remains that I have never lived in a society like this before.. a society where the harassment of women is so brazen and unabashed, where you get harassed while seeking redress for harassment, or where being black (and to a lesser extent, foreign) makes you a sexual fetish object in such vulgar and explicit ways. And mind you, none of this harassment comes from Creole/African Mauritians, it comes from Indian Mauritians, who constitute the Majority in a Brown-Black society that resembles the U.S. both in terms of the forms of racism that exist and its race based economic disparities.

Up until now, I've tried to keep my feminist politics of the non-separatist variety. However, with every day that passes here, the women-led society that Charlotte Gilman depicts in her novel Herland seems more and more like Utopia. I, for one, think Mauritius could do with a lot less disrespectful, predatory, misogynistic assholes.

Alas, here's to hoping that I can pass my last 7.5 months here without being groped, solicited for sex, picked up by old married men, or hit on by public servants. In the event that this modest wish does not come true, however, I have resolved that I will begin slapping, cursing and hollering at (in all languages that come to mind) anyone who violates or disrespects me in the future... presumably a much better strategy than diving off moving buses and running out of clubs with my hands covering my eyes. Hmph hmph.

Labels: street harassment, women's issues

Posted by east of madagascar at 10:42 PM | Permalink | Comments

Passing the holidays Mauritian-style helped to reify exactly how far away from home I am -- as if the 9 hour time difference, the two oceans, and the entire continent separating me from my motherland weren't indication enough.

Let's begin with a discussion on the weather. Unlike the twenty-one Christmases I've passed in Buffalo, NY, Christmas in Mauritius was noticeably without snow or as much as a grey cloud in the sky.

Now, on the rare occasions that Buffalo experiences a Christmas without snow, temperatures are so far below freezing its too cold for snow to actually form.

Not the case in Mauritius however. If you're from the Northeast and are having trouble visualizing what a non-white, non-freezing Christmas looks like, here's a bit of photographic evidence. This picture was taken about 2pm on Christmas day, and seated next to me are Chris (another fulbrighter), and Mikalya, his wife of four months.. oh happy happy love!

Wouldn't it be amazing to have a picture like this on your annual holiday card?

In addition to the snow, another thing that was conspicuously absent from Christmas 2006 was family. Ever since 2005 when my father passed, I haven't enjoyed being away from home for the holidays.. or far away from home in general. Happily, however, due to the wonders of Skype, I was able to talk to everyone from home, and in turn, celebrate the holiday with my "family" here in Mauritius.

In typical Mauritian, extended-family style, my family here is comprised of upwards of a dozen people. These are my neighbors Gaw and Kamlesh; Sunil, Enrica and Natalie, a Mauritian-American family; Jason, a Watson fellow in Mauritius for 3 months; Chris and Mikayla, the couple pictured above; and Bill, a Fulbright Scholar teaching at the University of Mauritius.

The group of us got together on Christmas Eve for a festive holiday dinner that consisted of roast chicken (no turkeys to be found here), soy chicken breast (vegetarian must-have), twice baked potatoes, butter nut squash soup, green bean casserole and halim, an Indian-Mauritian lentil soup. Not quite the collard greens, yams and cornbread that I'm accustomed to during the holidays, but delightful none the less.

For Christmas-day proper, the Fulbright-Watson research posse went to the Perrybere beach for a couple of hours (see picture above) and then returned home to watch several heartfelt Christmas-themed movies on DVD.

One thing that struck my about Christmas in Mauritius in general is how widely celebrated the holiday is. Despite the fact that 60% of people here are Hindu, Christmas is just as big here as it is in the United States. For Hindus, it's an occasion to buy gifts, have large office parties and cook really elaborate dinners for family.

The only real differences of note were the absence of Black Friday (which doesn't exist simply because there's no Thanksgiving here) and the dearth of hearty looking Christmas trees .. local varieties of pine are pretty anemic looking.

I don't know whether that makes Christmas in Mauritius a byproduct of secularization, appropriation, or brilliant marketing campaigns. perhaps a bit of all three. In any case, I hope you enjoyed the holidays as much as I did.. whether you passed it christian, jewish (is Hannukah really only a minor holiday? If so, what about the dreidel song?!? Talk about a let down..), or secular-humanist style comme moi.

Posted by east of madagascar at 10:53 PM | Permalink | Comments