So no updates for a while now. I feel like I’m still trying to get a handle on being in the archives…what I’m actually going to find, and writing about it seems premature. And really, while this is week two, I lost one day last week to a national holiday and one and a half other days so far to power outages. The power has been going out a lot here. Apparently we’re all waiting for it to start raining…and then there will be power again. Apparently also, when the power goes out, the archivists won’t look for documents. I’m thinking about bringing my headlamp in to see if they’ll use it. If they don’t get documents, I don’t think they do anything except for read a few different daily newspapers, and wait. Wait wait wait. And there’s nothing for me to do but sit and sweat as the temperature rises, waiting. There is so much waiting, and so much tacit compliance with waiting. I wonder if I would be any different. The archivists are nice though, and helpful when they can be but I am basically in the process of just seeing as many documents as I can, and trying to figure out what the hell I am doing. What I’ll be able to do, where to go next, how I should try to make the most out of the limited time I have left. Every day I sit in there feels like my margin of time to figure out if I should be looking elsewhere is getting smaller and smaller. If the power in the archives goes out, where should I go, what should I do with that day, who should I try to talk to… I don’t know yet how to be resourceful but I think the key is simply to start asking more questions. I think the reason people stay for a year for research like this is not because you work for a year…but you figure out how to work and then finally in the last four months…get everything done.
Right now I just don’t know…there’s lot’s of stuff on Colonial town planning and establishing municipal governments, court papers on wives that left husbands and thieves that stole livestock, and committees being formed and called to order…but nothing yet that I can imagine utilizing to tell the environmental history of the city after independence…not much from the sixties on, even less in English (which is an issue i haven't yet solved) from the sixties on…and nothing yet that helps me understand relationships between resources, space, new migrants to the city and municipal government. Not to mention waste, trash and pollution. It is weird to realize when you finally go to the archives that no one has probably ever told you as you trained to be a historian, how to read banal, everyday documents and turn them into a narrative, or to even have the foresight to know to at least collect these documents and take them home, and that later, when you collected more, you’d know what you needed and how to fit it together. I’m enjoying it, but its also makin’ me nervous.