Possibly the most important skill in fieldwork, and one that is lost in the many research methods lectures on interviewing, positionality and so on, is the simple and vital art of biting one's tongue.

Of course, in all walks of life, one has to accept that not all people have the same opinion as you, and that you must respect that. However, there are somethings that are harder to cope with than others. In particular, I do get shocked by the way children in my village get treated.

Of course, children here are certainly well loved, and the intention is most definately there to take care of them. If their parents are out working in the fields, the children are passed around neighbours and relatives in a way that perhaps a lawnmower or a really good novel is passed around in UK society. Like lawnmowers and novels, they are given a lot of attention, then returned with a slight smudge from an unrecognisable source.

Perhasp it is because my own mother has spent so many years working in public health, but I do struggle to restrain my moralising tongue when I see what they feed their babies. Most women in the village have their first child age 15, disturbingly often with their cousin. It seems that breastfeeding is virtually non-existant, instead mothers go out of their way to feed them with powdered baby formula. I don't know if this is because like many other things in the DR people automatically assume that a shop-bought 'American' product is better than the indigenous or natural product, or if it is for far more controversial reasons. Like almost all other universities in the UK, my employer has banned all Nestle products from its union shops, on the basis that Nestle is aggresively marketing powdered baby formula over breast milk, the natural option being better in 99% of cases, with the risk in formula of illness from dirty water, and therefore putting company profit over babies lives. The water in the village is exceptionally clean, though not flawless, particularly for young babies with weak immune systems, so the issue becomes the relative expense and the absense of nutrition and natural antibodies when missing the natural product. This boycott of Nestle is a central tennet of the right-on thinking that dominates student politics, but it is also a view that I have some sympathy with, given my own experience.

Out here in the campo, all of the colmados (village shops) have some brand names painted on the outside wall, so the casual passerby can clearly see what this shop sells. Common brand names include Presidente beer, Verizon phonecards, and Nido, a Nestle baby formula. I don't
know if Nestle have paid for these signs to be put up, or whether this constitutes an aggressive marketing campaign that turns mothers off breast feeding, but it is certainly grounds for suspicion. For once, I think I support the right-on thinking of the wannabe parliamentarians in Student Unions across the land.

It would be far more challenging for these people to incorporate some of my other observations into their thinking, as some of the other stuff people here feed babies cannot be blamed on ruthless international capitalism. Seeing a three month old baby given sweet coffee and sugary soft drinks, and a four year old given neat rum to drink shocks me. I can bite my tongue many of the other things that go on here, the views on Haitians and so on, but I really struggle from criticising my friends when they feed such stuff to their babies. I can try and formulate academic reasons for it, such as a developmentalist discourse that automatically assumes that 'modern' products are better than 'traditional' or 'natural', but it is no use. So far, I have managed not to burst into a lecture, though I did in another village when I heard the shockingly ignorant views of a local teenager on the causes of AIDS, and how to prevent it. I felt it was my moral duty.


Talking of babies, congratulations to C and S on the arrival of M!!