Participant observation After I had completed the round of interviews, my supervisors advised me to explore the opportunity of doing participant observation in the centre. At a meeting with the manager of the centre, he declined for security reasons. However, he offered the alternative to spend time at the NGO social services. As I had interviewed them for the research, they were amenable to the idea. Yet, neither them, nor me knew how to go about it. The NGO Arogos, whose work inside detention centres is explored in detail in chapter 6, had at the time locally established teams in three detention centres, Petrou Ralli, Elliniko and Aspropyrgos. These teams were comprised by social workers, psychologists and doctors. In Petrou Ralli, there was one doctor, two social workers and a psychologist, assisted by a Farsi speaking interpreter. They had been offered two rooms by the police on the second floor of the centre, the men’s section. The more spacious room contained two hospital beds, two desks and three large metal cabinets/closets, where medicine and NGO files were kept. The other room was much smaller and had a small desk and three or four chairs, where social workers would meet with detainees to talk about their cases. It also included a wooden bookcase with books and some children’s toys as women were detained together with their children. On the floor lay a large pile of clothes, which had been donated to the NGO and from which detainees could pick what they needed. Outside the rooms was a small waiting area with cement benches where detainees, accompanied always by one or two detention officers, would wait for their turn to visit either the doctor or the psychosocial services. I was there almost every day for two months (January-February 2012), observing the work of the NGO and their interactions with the detainees and the police. The sheer dedication of being there, hour after hour, day after day, is an important part of fieldwork. Researchers must prove themselves to research subjects in order to be accepted as an outsider-insider. Presence and persistence facilitate this hybrid status. So long as the researcher has a keen eye and is a shrewd observer of human behaviour, there ought to be a correspondence between the duration of fieldwork and the reliability of research findings. During that time, I spoke to many detained people while they were waiting to see the doctor, police officers and had many conversations with the practitioners during their breaks. When the NGO staff were too busy, I volunteered to answer phones, help detainees choose clothes or even liaise with the police officers. However, I tried to remain 50