7/5: A Day at the Office

We’ve switched to the control area, Kigoma Rural. It’s about what I expected – same mud houses with thatched roofs, now only spaced farther apart and located an hour down a dusty, bumpy dirt away from Kigoma. I went along with the team today to assist one of the supervisors in conducting in-depth interviews. We want to hear about the woman’s birth experience and her perspectives on home vs. facility delivery and PPH.

First thing this morning was a breakfast meeting at 7:30 with Dr. Godfrey to review the project and get the next disbursement of funds. We’re in charge of the day to day finances, paying the interviewers and TBAs their allowances, transport, communication, etc. We asked for the next ten days, and the bank only had 5,000 TSH notes (the highest is ten, so it’s not that small really), so we got a stack of cash about eight inches high (can you imagine $4,000 in $5s? That’s about what we got).

I met the team at the usual spot – Mama’s Best restaurant, and we took our hired Dala Dala to Simbo. Like I said before, it’s located about an hour out of Kigoma along a dirt road. Every time a car came in the opposite direction, everyone would close all the windows to prevent the thick clouds of dust from entering the car. This only partially worked, because I was covered in a film of dust by the time I got Simbo. The dust just cakes on throughout the day, and usually by the time I come home from the villages I hate touching my skin because it’s so gritty from all the dirt. It’s a bright red dirt here, and it stains everything – trees, shoes, clothes, and I’ve just noticed that the tan on my feet isn’t a tan – the dirt has stained my skin!

Mr. Mwamba interviewed two women, and I held our ghetto tape recorder up for him while he interviewed the mother. Of course I couldn’t understand anything that was being said, but at the end of each interview I had him ask her questions that weren’t on the prompt list that we’d created, just stuff I thought of at the time, like “if you got pregnant again, where would you want to deliver and why?”

In the afternoon we drove around picking up interviewers from around the village (it’s really spread out). We waited near the center of the village for a while, where there were piles of coconuts. Boys around ten years old trimmed down the outsides with huge sharp knives using long whacking strokes, and then created a drinking hole on the top. We all had one, and the coconut juice was alright (it kind of tasted like it wasn’t ripe yet). When you’re done drinking, you hand the coconut back to the boys and they grab their huge knives (a little scary seeing such young boys wielding such large knives) and start hacking away at the coconut, breaking it in half and loosening the meat for you to eat – that part was pretty tasty. A deal for 10 cents! Our interviewers also bought long sticks of sugar cane (one was the length of the dala dala; I heard a knocking noise while I was sitting reviewing questionnaires and turned around to find one of the interviewers with a huge knife cutting off a piece. Whereas I need someone to cut up the sugar cane for me, they just take huge bites out of it and spit out the hard outside, something I’m a little to timid to try.

Back home to enter data and organize completed questionnaires, and plan for the next two weeks. It’s crazy to think that we’ll (hopefully) be done at the end of two weeks! We still have approximately 200 questionnaires to administer, 15 in-depth interviews to conduct, and 6 focus groups to hold. We need to get all the qualitative work transcribed and translated before we leave too, along with gathering some basic statistics about the study population – we’ll be cutting it close!

Tomorrow will be another day at the office – I’m going back to Simbo with Mr. Mwamba to conduct more interviews – one with a mother and one with a TBA.