For this hatrick field season in Tanzania, I opted for some great kindle reading.  This Much I know is True by Wally Lamb (captivating), Nelson Mandela’s autobiography (still working on it) and Expat Etiquette: Looking Good in Bad Places by Michael Bear and Liz Good.

Expat Etiquette is incredibly appropriate to me, full of both legitimately good advice and tongue-in-cheek words of wisdom, and absolutely hysterical truths about being a westerner abroad in a poor country. These truths, however, might not be funny to most of the general public.

Some of my favorites insights [my reactions in brackets]:

This books is a humble guide to all those who not only want to travel far away and sometimes dangerous lands- for the best and worst of reasons- but also want to do so with a modicum of style. Style defines as “appearing to know what you’re doing even when you have no idea what’s happening around you.” [SO true]

Interacting with the Home Front

1. Embrace technology, but do so with [incredible] patience. Learn to love SIM cards, and switch between them strategically [as all Africans do], depending on competing long-distance calling rates. Teach your parents how to use Skype [thanks, M and D!].

2. Develop an adaptable but consistent response to the question “What do you do?” This should be appropriately self-mocking, and should preempt the assumption that you are, in some way or another, trying to “save the world.” Best to knock down pedestals early and often, before you are expected to actually somehow live up to that kind of nonsense. [Besides, even if you arrive with the actual promising good-intentioned naïve objective of saving the world, you will lose any semblance of that goal after precisely 2.5 weeks in country. If you stay for less than that amount of time, you are a tourist and can maintain bliss]

3. Get used to telling friends that you won’t be able to make their wedding/reunion/birthday/baptism-of-their-first-child. [Public apologies to: LPK, MMM, RKF, MC, JMM, MBH, SM]

The Only Piece of Travel Advice that Really Matters

1.      Sh*t will invariably go wrong. Relax. Do your best to develop a zen-like state of detachment.

On the last piece of advice (which is, in fact, the only piece of travel advice that matters):

I’ve noticed that the longer I stay here, the easier it is to be detached and relaxed. But this adjustment in expectations has both advantages and disadvantages. For the first month or so, highs are very high and lows are very low. Meeting new people and having funny conversations make me joyous, but when things go wrong (which invariably happens), I am crushed like a kid hearing Christmas is cancelled. However, after zen sets in and my expectations drop, I tend not to fully realize the meaningfulness of incredible human experiences here.

Daily challenges dissolve into a way of life, but so does the very uniqueness that makes this place different from home.

That is, until I Skype with my mom and she tells me this story is, in fact, a very cool experience and I should write it down. More on that later.

Hat tip: Mom and Dad.

Economics takes such a quantitative approach to research; we excel at measuring effects, not at explaining why those effects exist. So, I understand the value of focus group discussions. Allowing people the opportunity to openly explain why, and have responses that include more than a 0 or 1, is a small pittance to that effort.

It’s also useful to have a few anecdotes. There was the woman whose in-laws intervened after she and her husband had decided to use contraceptives.  Or a family planning worker who swears people listen to her public health message more when her she carries her official work bag. Even if my quantitative analysis is extremely rigorous, people remember these stories.

However, I mostly find focus groups to be an unpredictable, methodologically imprecise and difficult to analyze.

Last Tuesday, we conducted a focus group in one of the nearby study villages that was included in the intervention educating local family planning workers.  My field assistant liked this village; the village officer was very helpful, and this often made a big difference on how smoothly the household data was collected.

I was also impressed as a group of eight men were waiting at the village office for the meeting to start. Family planning discussions with men in Meatu can send off a flurry of debate, as many in these villages are firmly pro-natalist.   However, this focus group discussion went extremely smooth.  Yes, family planning would be useful for families in this village. Yes, I discuss contraceptive use with my wife. No, we don’t find it difficult to discuss.  So, conclusively positive reactions to family planning?

Not exactly. If I were to simply analyze the discourse during this discussion, I would miss the entire story.   With a little subjective judgment, I saw that the village leader officer had put on a nice show. The sample of this focus group discussion was clearly biased in favor of family planning. These men were mostly well educated and had mostly been screened to be appropriate for our discussion. 

However, there was one older gentleman in the corner who added two things to the discussion. His initial response to questions about the cost of children was that they are not expensive. And his conclusive statement about family planning was that  “it’s complicated.”

This guy was clearly not on the family planning train, had more-or-less gotten the message that the conversation should stay positive for the American guest and he was keeping his opinions to himself.

Meanwhile, my other beef with qualitative research analysis is the Worldes trend (see below). Apparently, this has become a hip and acceptable as a form of analysis. I could be the old man in the corner and just say the word “think" over and over, and this deep insight would make its way into some analysis in a presentation. 

Great for a t-shirt, I think, not for a conference.

Hat tip: ALD, LN

There is a fairly well-established internet literature about the excessive dumping of goods to developing countries mixed with hopeful intentions that falls under the cute acronym SWEDOW. Stuff We Don't Want. Now that I've been back in Tanzania for a couple of days, my bag is lighter after I distributed the stuff I brought from the states to friends who asked for things. Keep in mind that this list of stuff that may be needed is biased by the sample of (well-educated and outdoorsy) folks I mix with here in Tanzania.

Stuff they might want:

1. Smart phones. Especially iPhones. There are 0 authorized Apple stores in Tanzania. A black market certainly exists and second hand smart phones are around, but (probably due to the two-year contract renewals that come with new phones) they are still cheaper in the states. And the connectivity improvement that comes with having a smart phone in a country that mostly lacks landlines, service contracts and cheap computers but does have mobile banking and easy access to phone credit.... is huge.
2. Batteries, of all kinds. Long-lasting and high-quality batteries are also still cheaper in the US. Especially if your dad likes to buy the giant packs of AAAs from Costco.
3. Cords and cables. Also a quality issue. Computer cords and outlets seem to get a lot more element exposure (dust, rain, crummy outlets, playful children) in Tanzania than they do back in the states. I've come bearing two mini USB to USB cords to replace older frayed ones.
4. Tough ziplock bags. Clear plastic bags that actually keep liquid in or keep liquid out. I'm actually still reusing the same ones I brought in 2013.
5. Quality sunglasses. Well, this White-Person-with-Irish-Eyes needs sunglasses. It's not entirely clear if the average Tanzanian requires sun protection, but the dust in the dry season is up the wazoo, so sunglasses that don't break after 4 wears are extremely useful.
6. Good hairbands. The kind that are think enough to hold a big pony tail, don't have that painful metal doodad and don't break after one week. These are priceless.

Things to keep in mind as we navigate the SWEDOW flowchart. Any other suggestions?

It's actually like running a small business.

Here's why:

1. Income. I have applied to at least 16 sources of funding (and counting). That's 16 proposals, 16 budgets (because each grant/fellowship wants their own budget) and <16 sources of income (can't win 'em all).  I finally made a separate bank account for research monies, but that was a year into fieldwork. Why didn't anyone tell me to do that earlier?

2. Labor. I have employees in Tanzania and am occasionally surprised to find that I am the boss there. I'm thankful that I have actual professional work experience, decent leadership skills and excellent communication (for an academic, obviously).

3. Capital. That aforementioned research bank account that I finally opened? It includes reimbursed ATM fees (even internationally!), cheap international financial transfers and a personal banker that I can easily call up when I need another transfer to Tanzania (like, today). This type of fancy bank stuff does not come free to a graduate student with little capital, the account is co-signed by my dad.

4. I market my brand. I have a website.  I put some actual thought into the design and modeled it after doing some market research. Thanks, friends. In addition to getting valuable feedback from peers, the main point of going to conferences and giving talks in other departments is to market myself and my research.

5. I make my own schedule. My daily dissertation progress, or lack there of, is a cost or benefit that only I bear. Sometimes distracting and lucrative consulting opportunities fall into my lap. Sometimes its 72 degrees outside. Sometimes I stay in Tanzania way longer than I'd like. Often times, I work on weekends. No one is responsible for managing my time and risk, except me.

6. Zero personal life boundary. Why do my university and personal emails go to the same inbox? Because it would be too difficult to differentiate which emails are related to work/school and which emails are personal. My coauthors are my friends, I meet with students at 9pm, beer is often consumed over reviewer comments, I keep a change of clothes in my cubicle, my home bookshelf is dominated by textbooks and I live part-time in a researcher flop house.**

7. It's an unpredictable crap shoot. Sometimes I wake up at 4am and I have four emails from my employee (i.e. field assistant) that say we miscalculated some costs and I need to send cash, stat. Thus the value of #2.


**Based on this description, it is safe to say that I am single and child-less. I hope that this boundary might get a little thicker when I  a) am no longer a student and b) no longer single or child-less.

This video was easily my favorite part of Jameel Poverty Action Lab 's ten year anniversary celebration last weekend in Cambridge. And I wasn't alone; I'm pretty sure these J-PAL research assistants -cum- directors garnered the most applause of the entire event (even more than Bono... albeit on video).

Because I am PhD student conducting my own RCT, I have the pleasure as serving as my own principle investigator and as my own research assistant. The joys of reviewing piles of surveys, getting intimate with Stata and traveling in the back of vans on terrible East African roads rocking out to some American pop.... yes.

Although the prime publications, important policy implications and fancy awards get all the press, the real brilliance on an RCT happens in the field. Cheers, RAs.

My fantastic field assistant and his wife had their first baby two months after the start of the (year-long) intervention. I'm proud that we both work for an organization that gave him paternity leave. Now, four months after the start of the intervention, he has a bad case of malaria.

I'm worried about the size of the detectable effect on outcome variables, but health and babies are more important. Too bad good health doesn't get you three stars on a regression output table.

A friend of a friend is embarking on a research internship in Uganda this summer and posed the following questions:

In focus group discussions, did you compensate people (monetary or non-monetary) for their time? How long did each discussion last? What strategies did you follow when you were designing focus group questionnaires? What is the size of your focus group? And in terms of sampling, how did you get a random sample? Did you have village leaders to help you in the sampling process?

I was working with a well-known Tanzanian NGO and affiliated field assistant, which had experience conducting research and working in my study community.  We met first with the chairman in each village and asked them to organize groups of mothers and fathers for focus groups. We gave vague age restrictions (older than twenty) and asked for about ten to thirty people for each. This introduction worked fine because we did not need a random sample for focus groups, and it certainly helped the this NGO had a very good reputation for community development (trying to avoid those externalities again).  I wrote up about fifteen questions for each focus group (though these changed slightly for each additional village) and the discussions lasted about two hours. Because my main methodologies are quantitative, the focus group questions are more about informing the household survey and having a better understanding of cultural and institutional norms. We tried to play it safe with single-sex focus groups, but that did present some challenges. Participants were "thanked" (not, according to the NGO, compensated) for their participation with sodas bought at the local shops.

For the sampling procedure, we again benefited from the helpful village administration. Because Tanzania has a long socialist history, village and subvillage leaders keep track of families in their communities. So after another formal village introduction, and officially asking each village to participate in the study, we asked the leaders to make lists of every household in the village. The first day that we intended to start sampling, we took the lists (separated by subvillage) and numbered them (~200-800 households). We then pulled out the handy iPhone random number generator and picked households. We were sampling 60 households per village and sampled proportionately across subvillages (~2-9 per village). The subvillage leaders often came along with us in the truck to help find these randomly selected households. And then the fun began.

I spent yesterday afternoon at a lodge pool, drinking passion juice out of a straw, swimming and hanging out with other foreigners. This has inspired renewed appreciation for stuff expat aid workers like. A few of my favorites:

1. Drivers: the story of returning to Arusha.

Expat aid workers love drivers because drivers are accustomed to expat aid workers. Expat aid workers like to practice speaking new languages, and a driver will usually smile and indulge when in actuality his English is much better than the expat aid worker’s attempts at whatever other language.

2. Randomized Control Trials: the story of my dissertation (and who I really want to be).

For all of their number-crunching, “hard evidence”-obsessed, not-quite-really-relevant-in-the-real-world nerdiness, deep down most academic experts on “development” or “foreign aid” want to be Expat Aid Workers.

Even the late-adopters will eventually understand that RCTs are the wave of the future, precisely because RCTs will enable EAWs to provide those savvy, evidence-based donors with the proof-positive needed in order to feel good about having “made a difference” (forget a picture of the goat that I bought for a family in “Africa” – I want real evidence).

3. Describing oneself as a nomad: the story of my strategy to avoid a midlife crisis.

Expat Aid Workers are not sitting in a suburb somewhere watching the grass grow: they’re out there flying by the seats of their pants, never planning farther ahead than the end of their current contract, going to places that their parents probably cannot find on the map, and mingling with the bottom billion.

Having spoken to a lot of women who seem legitimately interested in family planning (although I have also developed a strong social bias detector), I'm more aware of the logistical challenges that Mama from Mwajidalala village might actually face in adopting contraceptives. Dispensaries are fairly well stocked and family planning is almost entirely free. For the most part, the Ministry of Health staff appears well-trained and dedicated to their work.

The big hold up to access is combination between timing and distance. It's Ministry of Health policy that women cannot start on a contraceptive unless 1) they've had a check-up to ensure that the method is the right one and 2) the big logistical challenge, that they are on their period on the day they visit the clinic. Both of these policies are standard health procedures and fairly consistent with my experiences in the states. The methodology behind timing adoption with current menstruation is to be absolutely sure that Mama from Mwajidalala isn't pregnant.

However, the crucial information of 1) and 2) from above are not very well-known (although the CBDs in my study are very hopefully spreading the word). If Mama from Mwajidalala, who works up the gumption to leave her work in the cotton fields for a day and walk to the closest dispensary, four hours away, she might finally arrive and be told that she hasn't come on the right day of the month. This is obviously frustrating and time consuming for Mama from Mwajidalala, so she might gives up there.

There's hope with the mobile clinics- the Ministry of Health's way of addressing the fact that villages and subvillages are so spread out in Meatu. The health center and district hospital operate a schedule of visits to each village every month for outreach. But for Mama from Mwajidalala, the timing is again a challenge since the mobile clinic schedule likely does not coincide with her menstrual schedule.  The probability of Mama being able to adopt contraceptives from the mobile clinic, is about 5/30, or 1/6.

All this timing and access challenge makes me grateful that my intervention lasts a full year. But even this feels too short.

My Swahili name is Tabasam. My Swahili professor gave me the name two years ago in class. I wasn't exactly the best student, but was very enthusiastic. So of course, when he called on me, I wouldn't know the answer but I was happy to participate anyway.  

Having a Swahili name is awesome. It saves me a lot of trouble of correcting people on pronunciation, which I clearly get enough of in the states (no offense, M&D, a very original spelling). Plus, you can't frown when someone just introduced themselves as smile. It's a great ice breaker before asking for a cold coke or a huge amount of phone credit. It's a little challenging to be taken seriously, though. When I have to (infrequently, thank Mungu) meet with a district administrator or medical officer, its slightly more awkward to say something like this: "I'd like you to write letters of introduction to each of the village executive officers directing them to democratically elect female representatives to participate in a seminar on family planning and community health. And by the way, my name is Smile."

Unless its from a child, I don't respond to mzungu much anymore.  Or Aine, for that matter. I even have a Sukuma (the main tribe of my research district) name too: Wonday. The family planning workers have told their kids (and clearly the neighbor's kids) that my name is Wonday, which they start shouting before I get out of the car. And since the small selection of passanger-mutually-agreed-upon-across-cultural-barriers music includes Akon (What! You guys don't like the dulcet hipster tones Yeasayer and Local Natives??), every time I'm greeted in the village, I get One Day stuck in my head. Sometimes we all just start singing along. Still working on teaching the rest of the chorus to these kids...

In the mean time, I'll pretend that all their lives they've been waiting for, they've been praying for, for the the people to say... WONDAY! WONDAY!