And I got to be part of distributing these gifts. It was a lot of fun.
In an effort to incentivize household visits and family planning consultations throughout the entire village (i.e. make sure this intervention actually happens), my project is giving "work materials." While a bicycle, backpack, raincoat and gumboots are certainly helpful work materials for tromping around distant subvillages and filling out forms, they are also particularly awesome gifts.
And I got to be part of distributing these gifts. It was a lot of fun.
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LS: I was about 7 seconds away from having a meltdown about my internet not working all morning just now, but this conversation really reminded me to lighten up.
ASM: Seriously, get real. I lack internet, a fridge, stove and running water in my bathroom. ASM: I drag buckets of water to shower. I hope you can picture this because you may know that I am not the strongest individual. LS: But I have to check twitter on my phone like some kind of barbarian! LS: Yes, mental image emphasis on the drag. LS: Well, I’m walking to the gym and my fingers are so cold its barely registering on the keypad of my iphone. Northern continent problems. ASM: The moon is so full tonight that I can’t see the southern cross. Southern continent problems. LS: Ok, you win. ASM: But I lose on the drag. LS: Well, to keep things in perspective I’m going to a small room with heavy things to drag around purposelessly because my life is otherwise devoid of exercise. LS: So, shower+gym all in one in Tanzania. ASM: Hahaha. It’s basically all the same. Courtesy of What's App, my new favorite method of communication. If you have a smart phone and want to be in touch with me, get this app (looking at you MBH and ECS). Further evidence of the importance of humility in doing research abroad:
One thing I’m finding in the field is that the struggle to do regular, non-research things often leaves me feeling helpless and generally incapable. ...At what point will I transition from “high-functioning kindergarten student” to “acclimated field researcher who can walk the walk in Brazil”? (Judging from my mentorship team, 8-10 years is the place to start.) From CS O'Connell It’s true; all the children [in Minnesota] are above average.
Courtesy of my adviser's presentation on the education Millennium Development Goals during the CSAE conference at Oxford last month. I'm pretty sure I was the only one in that got the joke. As an avid reader and follower of Chris Blattman’s blog (as in, I started this blog because his is awesome), I feel compelled to respond to his post discouraging field experiments. The post is no surprise; the fieldwork and experimental surge may now have a negative slope and when Blattman visited my department in the fall, he advised a group of us to buff up our theory and avoid collecting our own data. It also may be no surprise that I’m defending fieldwork; I’m halfway through five months in Tanzania. Top seven reasons to reconsider:
7. You will know your data extremely well if you collect it yourself. Far better than using a set of overly-analyzed public data, where you don’t know who collected it and if she counts Acacia thorns as “protection” when she codes “protected well” as the source of drinking water. 6. It builds character. I am realizing that a strong character is not necessarily a prerequisite for a career in academia and not related publication ability. However, I find that having told off a group of drunk heckling men in Swahili makes answering tough econometric questions during a lecture of students my own age, in English, a relative breeze. 5. Because you gain a fuller contextual picture and experience the local culture, you learn things you never expected. This is particularly useful for new research ideas and hypotheses. For example, when I conducted focus groups, which I imagined were only for narrowing down my household survey questions, I discovered a completely different variable that was affecting family size. Bride price. It’s in the works now, but big ideas and a possible dissertation chapter are stewing. All I had to do was ask. 4. It is a LOT of fun. Far more fun that working in a window-less office without interacting with a single other human being. Fun is clearly another non-requisite for academia. And I am finding that I may be in the minority of academics, and academic economists in particular, who likes working with people. I enjoy things like getting stuck in a rural river during a lightening storm and pretending to get sexual jokes during a Swahili condom demonstration. Honestly, the first two years of my PhD were miserable. Preliminary exams and coursework in economic theory are NOT fun. An adventure in Tanzania collecting data is good for the soul after a humbling month of 80 hour/week study sessions and a micro theory preliminary exam. This is clearly an impractical reason to do fieldwork, but this leads me to the fact that… 3. Frankly, getting a PhD is impractical. Evidence here, here and here. Don’t do it unless you’re completely confident that it’s the right life choice. But if you are that confident, you’re probably impractical. So go have fun. 2. Economics is a SOCIAL science. There is so much to learn about people in economic development. We should learn language, culture, institutions (all the rage), social norms, gender roles, education structure, financial system, and infrastructure for the full contextual picture. If you write about people and haven’t spoken much to the people you write about, to hear their point of view, how social is that science? I am a little skeptical of that sort of seemingly removed expertise in economic development. It’s a cliché, but it seems inappropriate and arrogant to sit high in the ivory tower in North America giving advice about people in poverty if you haven’t actually interacted with people in poverty. 1. Chris Blattman recommended it... six years ago. Well, given that I’m responding to his post in the first place, I should definitely get this right. He did not strictly recommend fieldwork; in fact he cautioned against big long-term field projects and encourages good field preparation and minimizing risk. But in the post that reminds me that I won’t lose my soul in grad school, he wrote “How to get a PhD *and* save the world:” 3. Take chances…Where I think [my committee] were wrong is that they told me to abandon my plans for risky and expensive fieldwork. They favored the less risky route that could get me to a completed dissertation faster. My chair’s response: “Hey, if you really want to do this, why not? Give it a shot. If it doesn’t pan out after three months, then come back and work on something else. Worst case scenario: you lose a few thousand dollars and a summer, but you have a great experience.” I plan to give the same advice to my students. I’m sure all the risk-management conditions still apply, despite the fact that this recommendation was six years ago. But, in the most polite and respectful manner possible, I’d like to point out that timing matters for this sort of advice. I’m still a single twenty-something graduate student with a fierce grip on my ideals and sense of adventure. Blattman wrote the initial post when he was either a post-doc or still a grad student. With all due respect (which is a lot), he has since become 1) a professor and 2) a father. These two facts and his experience makes him a bajillion times more qualified to give informed advice than this inexperienced blogger. And I might tame my impractical advice as well if I ever grow up. But in the meantime, I’m still thinking about how to get a PhD *and* save the world. Hat tips: LZ, BLK [After asking all the normal safari questions...]
Me: Are all of the guides men? Arnold the manager: Yes Me: Why haven’t you hired any women as guides? Arnold: [Laughing, looking at male guides] Ah, well, guiding a safari is hard work. Me: Driving and talking about wildlife? Women can’t do that? Arnold: Ah, but they have to change tires. Me: I can change a tire [Slight exaggeration.] Arnold: Ah well, some there are some guides who are women, but they are very few in all of Tanzania. Me: But you haven’t hired those guides? Arnold:[Laughing] Ah, no, not yet Me: This is serious. I’m doing economic research here in Tanzania and if you leave women out of the formal labor market, and don’t let them have good jobs like guiding safari, this will be very bad for the Tanzanian economy. Very bad. [Slight exaggeration, mostly in regards to my qualification for that statement] Arnold: [Contrived seriousness] I understand. Me: Well, I have to do some research about other companies and compare prices. But if you hire a woman guide, I will definitely hire your company for the safari [Slight exaggeration]. In the process of delivering the newly trained family planning distributors back to their villages, we had to travel to one extremely remote village. I consider the town where I live now to be remote, because there are no newspapers, other researchers or cheese. But the villages that are part of my study are villages where there are no refrigerators, cars, computers or kerosene stoves. This particular village, Witamhiya, is the most remote of those villages. Just to give an idea.
To get out there, we have to cross this river, which is about fifty yards across but fairly shallow, maybe only two feet deep at most. But, it is obviously sandy and muddy. You can see where this is going. On the way to Witamhiya, we get across just fine. We do some practice family planning consultations with the three wives of one man who had about twelve seemingly malnourished children and then begin to make our way back. We start across the river and get one third of the way across before the truck gets stuck. So, we get out of the truck and start to push. This includes me, Loi (field assistant, driver, friend), two distributors with babies on back, and the family planning training facilitator, who is a nut. A handful of Witamhiya residents are standing around at the riverbank watching us, washing, watching us, watching their cattle. So we ask someone to go get village leader. They send the traditional healer. He is pretty useless. His friend, however, gets two oxen to pull the truck and one more strong man. We try to push while the oxen pull (literally attached to the tow of the front of the truck). Oxen=Tanzanian AAA? Not exactly. It still doesn't budge and the front tire is getting deeper into the sand. Also, there is a lot of cow poop. We are basically standing around in a warm poop-green river. They send for two more oxen. We sit around the river talking about Obama. Four oxen pulling and eight people pushing does nothing for the truck. No cell service in Witamhiya. More sitting around and looking at the oxen. By now, it is 6pm and as if on cue, a dark cloud appears upstream. Huge and growing. The sun is setting and the awesome yet ominous wind that smell of rain starts to blow in our direction. So Loi calls it and says he is going to run towards bigger village until he gets cell service, call the distributors friend with a pikipiki (mo-ped), then pikipiki around until he can find someone with a land rover. I lie down on the riverbed and take a nap because this could be a while. When I wake up, it’s getting cold and dark, so the other distributor (with baby) and I walk back to the car in the middle of the river and get inside. The truck is warmer, so we sit there with the nut training facilitator who is soaking wet and in his underwear from failed attempts at digging under the car. Eventually, the other distributor returns and says Loi found a pikipiki and that we should come to her house to rest because the storm coming. I know that leaving the car means that we might be spending the night in Witamhiya, but staying in the car in the middle of a very wide river during a brewing storm seems like not the best idea. So the babies, mamas and I walk about a mile to her home on the other side of the river. There is a small room with the traditional stick/straw roof, chairs, charcoal and wood. I'm dehydrated by this point, so I ask for tea, thinking at least that's boiled water. However, there isn't any tea, and she I think she doesn’t want to admit it to me, so she goes to milk a cow and tells me to sit down while we wait for Loi to return. But I can’t sit down inside, because outside is the most unbelievable lightning storm I have ever seen in my entire life. Out in the middle of nowhere, there is a lot of sky to see. My hosts kept encouraging to get me to stay inside where it was warmer, but all I wanted to do was watch this lightning. Plus, if it starts to rain, and the truck is washed downstream, I want to know immediately. Then, we see lights in the distance and Loi comes towards the river past the house on a tractor with a few men from the next town. We're so far away from city lights that tractors are identifiable from miles away. They head towards the river to try to tow with the tractor, which is basically the last hope or we give up until tomorrow. And pray it doesn’t rain. I am worried about losing the car in the river or staying the night in this very small home without much food, but mostly I was just stunned by the beautiful lightening. I finally get myself some boiled water, which I drink from a metal bowl outside in the lightening. Dangerous? Upon reflection, perhaps. But despite the vivid light and sound in the sky, there is still no rain. As the thunder begins to move to the northern sky, the tractor returns to the house. There is only one set of lights, one vehicle, so I'm ready to give up. But then, Loi is not with them! They say that Loi is 'mazunguku' which is like 'mazungu' which means white person, but it only means white person because it means ' to go around.' Loi is going around! In the truck! The truck is saved! He picks us up from the Witamhiya hosts and we journey back to town in the truck. Every single village that we drive through on the way back has had rain. Trees were down from the storms and crops had been damaged from heavy rainfall. We are so incredibly lucky it didn’t rain in the river. Working with a great group of enumerators, dedicated family planning distributors and intelligent NGO staff, I’ve found that I’m interacting with folks who want my research to turn out well. I’ve also found that Tanzanians in particular are non-confrontational and eager to please. This combination, as I learned in my last field experience, lends itself to the possibility that instead of learning the truth in this research, I’ll get handed the “right” answer.
Last week, my field assistant, a family planning trainer, three distributors and me traveled to a Meatu district village to practice household visits and family planning consultations. Two of the trainers are absolutely fantastic, dynamic and encouraging. The trainer who traveled with us last week was not one of those two. Once we got out to Sapa village, one of the distributors and I visited a small household with a 35-ish year old woman, who had a baby on her back, and was sitting over a pot of simmering rice. I sat listening to the conversation, which dabbled between Swahili and Kisukuma (the local tribal language), trying not to be too invasive in this personal discussion. There was some mention of the clinic and being sick. She pulled out the family planning questionnaire from her bag and began asking the questions. Meanwhile, the trainer came over to supervise the conversation and sat between the distributor and myself. When the distributor got to the last question about whether the woman wanted to take any contraceptives, which is meant to facilitate discussion about which method may be the most appropriate, the trainer swooped in and began to mansplain to her why yes, in fact she does want them. [A small apology to JAJ for the condescending vocabulary choice, but mansplain is, in fact, entirely the most accurate word for this situation.] I began to interrupt and he spoke to me in English, which the distributor and interviewee both cannot understand: “Does she want to take family planning? Yes is the answer.” He took the questionnaire from the distributor and marked the “ndiyo” (yes) box. I explained in meager Swahili that I wasn’t sure she had actually said yes since she indicated that she had been sick. “Yes,” he said, “the hormones gave her psychological problems.” Well, hello, then it is understandable that she might say no to this question. I tried to explain that if she actually says that she does not want contraceptives, it is not a problem for the form, regardless of the reason. If she says no, we should mark the box no. “Ah,” he said, “family planning, it is a process.” To him, I think this means that “no” is only acceptable for the first few visits, but then, of course “yes” is the right answer. This seems to be his interpretation of the objective of my research, which he is very happy to hand to me on a silver platter. I later explained this to my field assistant, who is excellent at translating my worries into clear directions in Swahili. But I still have a lingering concern that this trainer may have imparted the notion that we are only looking for the right answer, which is yes, everyone wants contraceptives. |