Wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve made it back to the blog. We are still here, alive, and healthy. Research and activities here have kept me busy, which is a good thing. I tend to go a little crazy when I don’t have much to do. During the week, I’ve been going variously to the hospital and to villages to find research participants. One morning of work can get me as many as nine interviews, or as few as one, depending on circumstances.
For example, last week went like this:
On Monday, while trying unsuccessfully to find severely anemic patients at the hospital, I looked up people who had been in-patients for anemia in the past two years. I found five, all of them living in remote villages not on bus routes. While talking to one of the nurses trying to get permission to look up names, I discovered she herself was pregnant and severely anemic, so we interviewed her.
So on Tuesday, my research assistant (who was two hours late because of public transport problems) and I, along with Juma, hopped in our friend’s taxi. We had nothing more than names, ages, dates in the hospital, and village names to find the women. Sometimes, this is quite enough. In the first village, we stopped randomly and asked the person closest to the car if he knows the woman on my list, and he pointed two houses down. Her husband was there, but reported that she was in the farm field. He asked his son to take us there, only to find that she had left and we had missed her on the path. We found her back at the house., but as soon as I started the interview, Juma broke down crying. I had to leave my assistant to finish the interview while I calmed Juma down.
The next village was quite large, so we had to stop at the local hospital and ask the nurses to look the second woman up in their register books. We asked more people as we got closer, and finally found her after half an hour of looking. That took all morning.
Wednesday, while waiting for my research assistant to make her trek down from another town an hour away, I got a text message from her, asking to be excused from work because her co-wife’s child had died. I, of course, told her to forget work and attend the funeral. It turned out there was a triple drowning of 18-22 year old boys (two of them first cousins) when a small boat overturned on its way back from an outlying island where the boys had played a soccer game. None of the three knew how to swim.
I expected her to ask to skip work on Thursday, too, but she showed up at the hospital in the morning. After making sure she was okay and hearing the story, we pursued another couple women, only to find one had been divorced and moved to another village. The other, we discovered when we arrived at her house, was at the very hospital we had just left an hour before. So we interviewed someone else while we waited, and the woman returned. Three interviews took all morning.
Friday, we pursued a woman in a nearby village, but never found her because the village was just too big to find someone based on name alone. We hopped on a daladala (local transport) and went to find the woman who had been divorced. Turns out she was visiting relatives on the mainland. Zero-for-two. And that ended my research week. By that point, I knew we were only a kilometer away from where my assistant’s relatives were mourning the loss of their two boys (cousins), so I went to pay my respects and say pole. I didn’t get away without being greeted by every extended family member, and being stuffed with sugar dates and pilau (a local rice dish cooked on every significant occasion). The support of family members and friends for the mourners was heartwarming. They will have people around them for four or five days to cook for them, cry with them, sit with them in solidarity, remember stories of their boys’ childhoods, and get them, little by little, to laugh again.
No comments:
Post a Comment