The name is absent

Metro to unfamiliar stops or I would connect to the light rail or bus system and randomly
disembark, walk, photograph, and explore new places in and around Athens. Near the
end of my fieldwork this method evolved further. I was interested in regaining this sense
of “being in a new place” in the areas with which I was familiar. To this end I began to
perform a theater exercise⁵ according to which I would select a location that I had studied
extensively and I would stand in it silently, without my watch or mobile phone, for hours.
For me, this exercise succeeded in rendering the familiar strange again⁶, it helped me to
recreate the “anthropological place”, and eventually became an invaluable tool that I
would use to regain perspective as my fieldwork progressed and I became increasingly
comfortable.

While in the field I also со-founded and operated a small NGO⁷, Minority
Equality Research in Action (MERIA) (see Alexandrakis 2008). The other members of
MERIA included my co-director and fiancé at the time, Jordana McMurray, and a
number of partners including several doctors based in and around Halandri, a teacher who
worked in Halandri, and numerous volunteers. The purpose of the organization was
threefold: first we endeavored to provide partner-backed community health education to
the Roma community of Halandri; we provided policy recommendations to the Ministry
of the Interior; and last, we consulted with local medical clinics interested in developing
outreach programs⁸. Personally, MERIA allowed me to give something back to the

⁵1 learned this from my aunt, Aliki Alexandrakis, who is an actress and teacher in Athens. The exercise is
based on Beckett’s Waitingfor Godot.

⁶ The idea here was to recapture a sense of “astonishment” as described by Shweder, that is, returning to a
pure sense of being in the world (1991).

⁷1 со-founded the not-for-profit organization Minority Equality Research In Action (MERIA) in Canada,
but we operated exclusively in Greece.

⁸We worked mostly with private clinics in developing outreach programs.

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