In part 3 of the Fieldwork 2010 series Master’s student Katie Rabar tells us about her first impressions as a researcher of asylum seekers in Holland.
One of the biggest challenges I’ve found in finding a research site is that I only speak one language fluently. For me that’s English, and I chose to conduct my research here in the Netherlands, in Noord Holland, looking at how asylum seekers experience and construct ‘home’. I speak only a tiny bit of Dutch and I’ve sat through hours of classes at my fieldsite where every language was being spoken but English. This means putting into practice all the language skills I have acquired growing up, and I am able to understand a variety of languages with some proficiency but responding… well, not so easy.