It was getting dark in Goma in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). I was sitting with Bennett Shabani, my field assistant/fixer/translator, planning out the next day's meetings. My PhD project on peacekeeping economies— the formal and informal economies that grow up around peacekeeping missions, and that enable missions, and peacekeepers, to function— in the DRC and Liberia involved interviewing a diverse range of sources, from peacekeeping leadership and rank and file, to expatriate businesspeople and local elites, to people working, mostly informally, in the services and establishments catering to peacekeepers. I had talked to drivers, domestic workers, private security guards, student leaders, waitresses, restaurant owners, property managers, street market sellers, hotel managers and local employees of the UN mission and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), in an attempt to understand how peacekeepers and peacekeeping— as practice, politics and as a locus and driver of gendered socio-economic activity— interact with, implicate and are affected by local women, men and communities. Most of the previous day was spent with a group of young women who supported themselves, in whole or part, through relationships with UN peacekeepers or rich Congolese men, but did not consider themselves (nor were generally considered by others) as sex workers. In Liberia, women in similar situations are referred to as ‘sugar babies’; in Goma, according to Oldenburg (2015: 323), a term in circulation is fille maline (‘smart girl’). Getting in with the sugar babies was largely coincidence. Bennett had an acquaintance who had been dating a MONUSCO guy. She agreed to meet with me, and her story rang so true— the small details about MONUSCO (the United Nations Organisation Stabilisation Mission in the DR Congo), including the specifics of how much of the peacekeepers’ monthly allowance was paid out in DRC for local spending and when— that I accepted her invitation to meet other girlfriends of her acquaintance. The afternoon with the girlfriends was fun and well spent, adding to my store of details, nuances and observations about transactions, interactions and life in the ‘peace-kept’ city (Jennings and Bøås, 2015).