Annabelle Chin

Tomorrow, it will be over

Words lost to time

Our months will lay abandoned

But the days they will be mine

I joined for fleeting moments

For the laughter through the pain

The treasure was not glory

But the friends we made along the way

This is a poem I wrote to describe my experience in my fieldsite, the Secondary School Interactive Crisis Simulation (SSICSIM), and with which I opened my ethnography. My TA, Alaa Attiah, suggested that the class try exploring our fieldsites with poetry, and it was then that I realised the value poetry could have in my ethnography.

This poem was supposed to do three things: 1. Offer an introduction to my fieldsite; 2. Condense and verbalise feelings I didn’t have space for in my ethnography; 3. Gesture at the core argument of my ethnography.

1. Opening

My fieldsite needs a lot of explanation. It has a lot of terminology and hierarchy and procedures. Therefore, I found it hard to find an opening anecdote that would set the scene for my audience without first explaining a ton of context and confusing terminology. Something artistic, like a poem, helped to do this. It conveyed my sentiments in a way that feels personal and moving, hooking my audience before walking them through my what-is-SSICSIM introductory spiel. It introduced everyone to what SSICSIM feels like before I told them what SSICSIM is.

2. Feelings I didn’t have space for

SSICSIM is a conference, and I did my ethnography on the people planning it. Most people who were a part of SSICSIM put in months of effort just for it to be over in a single weekend. The conference weekend was a whirlwind of fun and chaos, bonding and suffering, and was over before I knew it. All of the materials we prepared, plans we had, slideshows we made, were now never going to be touched again. I didn’t have time in my ethnography to really dwell on this feeling, and I didn’t have time to emphasise just how much work we did and suffering we went through in order to deliver the conference. Art, however, condenses a lot of feelings into a few words, and so I used the poem to represent what I wished I could have said.

3. The Core of my ethnography

Despite feeling sad about SSICSIM being over, SSICSIM is never truly over if true friends are made, because the community goes strong even after the conference has ended.

The title of my ethnography is “The Friends We Made Along the Way”. This is a popular trope where the main characters go on a long adventure to find pirate treasure, only to realise that instead of monetary treasure, the real treasure were the friends they made on their journey. It sums up the argument of my ethnography, which is that in order to make long-lasting friends, you must actively contribute to the journey. If you want to make some pirate friends, you must work hard to find the pirate treasure. And if you want SSICSIM to last longer than the weekend, you have to work your butt off to make that weekend a success.