What We Do

It’s been a busy week since I last wrote. I figured you all might want to know what it is I actually am doing here in Kigoma. In 2003/2004 my professor conducted a study here, teaching traditional birth attendants (TBAs) how to recognize postpartum hemorrhage and administer misoprostol, a drug that makes the uterus contract and so stops the bleeding. It was a successful intervention, and the TBAs have continued to use miso since then by themselves. Our project is to interview women who have given birth since the intervention ended (August 2004) to assess the acceptability, feasibility, and reach of TBA distribution of miso.

Since arriving in Kigoma, we have finalized the translation of the questionnaire into Swahili and trained a group of ten interviewers. Each day, an interviewer is paired with a TBA in a neighborhood of Kigoma (it’s called Kigoma urban, although I think their conception of “urban” is a little different than ours – these are more like villages with houses made out of mud and roofs made out of straw, no electricity or running water). The TBA introduces the interviewer to women she has helped deliver, and the interviewer conducts the structured questionnaire. This week, Kristina and I have been rotating following the interviewers to see how they are doing with the questionnaire. Even though we don’t speak Swahili, it’s amazing what we can pick up and have found points of confusion where the interviewers were not asking the questions correctly (the problem with working in second languages!!). At this point, we are pretty confident that they have it down.

So in the mornings we meet at 8am at the hospital and disperse, and then we return around four and people gives their completed questionnaires. We sit at Mama’s Best restaurant and review the questionnaires for mistakes, and clarify questions for the interviewers. Then it’s back on a dala dala (minibus) to our hotel, where we usually go for a run, eat dinner, and then enter the day’s data (35 – 50 interviews). We’re usually done around midnight, and then it’s up to do it all again the next day. Now that we’ve reviewed the interviewers, we can start going once or twice a week and have our days free, which makes us really excited – these long days are starting to wear us down! It’s tough work but we’re really enjoying it.