129 VOLUME XXIII – 2008 Professor Marc Sommers is an Associate Research Professor of Humanitarian Studies at the Fletcher School. He is the author of six books and numerous book chapters, articles and reports, and has worked as a consultant, researcher and evaluator with many donor and UN agencies, NGOs, and policy insti- tutes. He has carried out field research in 20 war-affected countries, and his research interests include youth, education, peace education, conflict negotiation, security, child soldiers, urbanization, and human rights issues in war and post-war contexts. The author may be contacted at Marc.Sommers@tufts.edu. A Day of Fieldwork in Rwanda Marc Sommers T he following description of one day of fieldwork in Rwanda took place while I was carrying out research on the situation of youth there. The work was funded by the World Bank (under the supervision of Maria Correia and Pia Peeters). Under their leadership, the research focused on how Rwandan youth became adults, and how gender roles, and masculinity in particular, impacted youth trajectories. 1 A central component of site selection was to compare rural youth residing in remote areas to those living much closer to towns or cities. This selection was based, in part, on the hypothesis that rural youth in remote areas would be less mobile than those in places that were more acces- sible to urban areas. This did not turn out to be the case: youth in remote areas proved just as eager to migrate to towns, cities and large agricultural farms as their rural brethren living near main roads and urban areas. The day of fieldwork recorded here took place in a remote corner of rural Rwanda. I had decided to take notes on an entire fieldwork day the night before. I then drafted a complete initial draft while awaiting a connecting flight in Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, Kenya, on my way home from Rwanda. The fieldwork day was in November 2006; the day in Nairobi’s airport was in early December. All of the names and locations have been altered. My research team and I are staying in a guesthouse in a small town beside a rocky mountain road. It’s part of a vocational training center. All are welcoming, but I somehow make the man in charge of our visit nervous. One night, when I went up to our house in the dark to do some work before dinner, he became worried. “How could you let him go alone?” he asked my colleagues. He never really talked to me beyond greetings, but for some reason, he thinks I’m unhappy. I’m not, and I smile and shake his hand whenever we meet. But his worries never end, and it amuses my colleagues. He also mistakenly once called mosquitoes “moustache” in Kinyarwanda during a talk with one of my colleagues, so he has gained a nickname. He is Moustache.