When I was a child, we lived in
How fitting, then, that a comfort food of the past two weeks (in addition to canned sardines, granola bars, and a newly-discovered tasty source of nutrition: instant infant food--) has been these same crackers. In addition to this hodge-podge of accessible staples, we have feasted on yesterday’s baaing goat, a ratazana (rather large rat hunted as bush meat), and I have been served several simple but delicious meals in huts.
These past two weeks, as you may have already suspected, have been spent in the field here in the 
(Franziska and Silvestre marvel that we got the bikes on the truck)
In Nhamatanda, we set up camp at a training center for health professionals. Fortunately, we had a water source available, toilets to use (wash water dumped in afterwards for a flush), and electricity. I learned quickly how to take a bath with my metal cup from a bucket (thereby washing my coffee cup and my body at the same time…and my socks and underwear with the leftover water…), and quickly abandoned any traces of modesty associated with communal bathing.
After training nearly 30 local enumerators in the first two days in addition to the 14 students we had brought with us from the Universidade Pedagogica da Beira, we selected 25 local enumerators to work with us.
(training in action)
(students learn how to use a GPS unit)
A workday in Nhamatanda went something as follows:
Up, sometimes before my alarm, at dawn. If we were lucky, the local cook hired by the students had already made a fire to boil water and run into town to buy bread. This luck meant instant coffee—the days without were brutal for me! Despite being a morning person, I am somewhat caffeine dependent for a smiling face at 5:30 AM.
From our camp, we piled into three vehicles (one of which I wound up driving the first week, much to my surprise--) and drove from the camp to meet the local enumerators at the district administrative offices. There, I dug out the master map and the smaller sample maps, and divided the randomly-selected quadrants among our seven groups, each led by a team leader with a GPS.
(at work, planning the day)
After getting dropped somewhere roughly in the vicinity of their quadrants, each group was then responsible for finding each quadrant using the topo maps, compasses and GPSes and finding the appropriate number of houses to interview. You may think this sounds like a fairly straightforward task; I can assure you that it is no such thing. Finding quadrants and houses within these quadrants often required up to 2 hours of off-roading in a truck, up to 15 km of walking (what I hiked with a group one day), braving the hot sun, tromping through burned areas, old corn fields, riverbeds, and brambles, and getting totally disoriented.
All of this effort—and sometimes no huts to be found. This was a constant frustration. Nonetheless, we rounded our goal of 500 interviews in Nhamatanda on Wednesday the 12th.. I finished it off with a celebratory cold Heineken, and we moved on to the district of Muanza on the 13th. Muanza has been a little less hectic…mainly because we are not covering quite as large a geographic area, and because we are slightly more experienced. The biggest problem has been that our sampling strategy dictates that we sample at a density of 5 houses per km in an area that has nowhere near this number. So, we have adapted.
Challenging moments over the past weeks have included testing my off-road driving skills to the utmost (and usually wowing the locals with them…except for one unfortunate encounter with a stump while driving through a field of tall grass….the local enumerator probably wanted to strangle me after I then applied alcohol to his busted lip), groups getting stranded without rides back to camp, trying to talk my way out of a tricky situation with a village chief that had not been advised by the district that we would be arriving, and digging a thorn out of my knuckle with…another thorn…while sitting through an interview. Sunscreen runs in my eyes when I am hiking, but a full day without it here, and I am crisped. Hitching a ride to
Sad moments have been families explaining to you how little they eat, about the diseases they contend with, and how much time and energy they must dedicated daily to finding fresh water. Occasionally I lose my patience with students that are whiners and are unwilling to walk…or with the fruitless hunt for houses in remote, randomly-selected quadrants.
Beautiful moments have been smiles shared with households who genuinely enjoy sharing their realities with us, laughter shared with fellow field buddies when you have just walked for 3 km to find yourself in an uninhabited forest…but attain your GPS points. Evening sunsets while bathing in a reed mat bathhouse under the open sky. Fresh papayas and eating things that I can’t identify.
Frank calls regularly to catch up on our activities and to give his two cents worth, and I appreciate his degree of trust in me and everyone else who is throwing themselves into this project. I know that he wishes he could be here—and there are times I wish I could be sitting in an office living a normal life this month.
Field work is tough. It requires enormous amounts of resources—time, energy, money—and it never transpires neatly, as planned. We don’t always have these resources available, and theoretical models also have their place. The opportunity to give rise to models from rigorous field data, however, I think is pretty cool. Call me a dork.
I am fortunate to have a job in which I am asked to create models as well as to converse with families in rural huts in
This sort of contrast keeps me grounded in the reality of the work that I do—puts faces with the thousands of data points, and gives context to the results that we dedicate ourselves to interpreting and conveying to the world. Without this, we as researchers are what a member of my master’s committee likes to call “armchair economists”; economists that postulate and run our models without knowing whether our conclusions reflect the complex picture of the world, a country, or a family unit in
Some more visuals...
This guy ran to change his clothes after I asked to have my picture taken with him...and brought his radio for good measure!
This enormous stack of wood was being covered in earth to create a charcoal furnace. Large amounts of deforestation in the Muanza area are occuring due to the market for charcoal, which is used primarily for cooking.
I just had to laugh...this guy is on the cutting edge of early adoption.
They eat a lot of cooked corn meal, here...I partook of some that this woman here was preparing.
Signing off for at least another week an a half…hope this has given you a taste of what I’ve been up to!
