Almost Done

We’re down to our last few days in Kigoma – thank goodness! The project wrapped up really well. We ended up with 930 completed questionnaires – about double our target so we’re really happy. All the data has been entered, just has to be cleaned up a bit. We need to prepare the boxes of surveys to be shipped back to the States, but that should b finished tomorrow afternoon. During the last two weeks of data collection, we also conducted almost thirty in-depth interviews with mothers, TBAs, and nurse/midwives at the hospital. Last week we held five focus groups with community leaders, TBAs, and health workers. They went really well, and we have almost ten hours of recording from them. What we’re waiting for now is to have all the audio transcribed into Swahili before we leave, so it can be translated into English when we get back to Berkeley. So, needless to say, we’ve been busy busy the last few weeks. But now there’s only a few days left, and we’re itching to go. We really could finish what we need to do in less than a day, but we have to wait for all the transcription. It’s dragging on, and it doesn’t look like we’ll get to leave until the end of the week. It’ll leave us with about a week to travel, and we’re hoping to go to Arusha for a one-day safari and then on to Zanzibar for a few days on the beach. And then, two weeks from today, I’ll be on my way home. It’s hard to believe that the summer is almost over; it’s gone by really fast. I’m happy to be coming home, and I’m really ready to leave Kigoma. With only one restaurant left that hasn’t made us sick, and nothing to do but sit in our room at night, we’re really ready to leave!