The name is absent

Roma community that had helped (and tolerated) me since my MA⁹. I felt that my
involvement with this community could no longer be one of an observer, or even
participant-observer. When Vasilo and a number of other community members asked me
to find a nurse that could answer their medical questions, I obliged and MERIA was the
outcome. For my dissertation research the NGO also provided invaluable access to
particular political circles, exposed me to the various laws and expectations governing
NGOs in Greece, and eventually became a para-ethnographic site (see Holmes & Marcus
2005a; 2005b) which is still productive today. Of course, the NGO also raised a number
of problems, which I address thoroughly in a recent publication (Alexandrakis 2008, see
Appendix 1). I will, however, recount here one instance where my role as an
ethnographer was complicated by my responsibilities as the director of MERIA.

In the final months of my field research the Roma community we were working
with requested that we help them arrange for a medical team to visit the compound to
conduct general check-ups and to administer vaccinations including a tuberculosis
vaccine. MERIA had several medical professionals on staff, but they could not conduct
the check-ups or administer medicine due to complications associated with licensing
foreign doctors and nurses. This was not a problem, however, as one of our goals was to
create lasting relationships between the Roma and local health service providers. Some
research led us to two nearby public clinics. Unfortunately, speaking with the
administrators in charge of these sites revealed that an outreach-style program¹⁰ would be
problematic. Both administrators argued that it was not within their means to conduct

⁹ Some anthropologists I have trained with suggest it is not really clear when fieldwork actually begins and
ends. In retrospect, my experiment with MERIA was perhaps an unwitting extension of my MA field
research. As the following will show, the NGO proved useful to the present work, but presented some
practical and other issues along the way.

¹⁰ The concept of outreach was problematic for us on several other accessions as well (see appendix 1).

<<   15   16   17   18   19   20   21   >>

More intriguing information