Okay, enough of the "eth"

Out with Katamba's team, braving the bush for the sake of data collection:

My office for a morning:

Had an interesting experience at this club. We were about an hour into the surveying when one of the respondents admitted that he had been asked by the club's patron to say he was somebody else.

For each of these clubs, we'd met with them once before to collect a list of club members. From these lists, we randomly selected 12 to be our respondents. As we are returning to the clubs now, to do the actual full individual-level survey, we call in advance and ask that these particular 12 club members be present. People routinely promise high and low that all 12 of them will be there, no problem. And low and behold, about 75% of the time the enumerator teams actually arrive at a club... they're not. Usually only about two are present, and frequently several other club members are there. The club patron usually makes some comment along the lines of "well I figured you could survey these club members instead, because those other ones that you wanted aren't here." It is frustrating to a profound degree. Why do people just straight-up lie? I DON'T UNDERSTAND. I mean, we'll be in the matatu on our way to the club, talking to the patron on the phone and he/she is saying "yes! All 12 are here right now, we're waiting for you!" and we show up and every damn time it's a damn lie! Half of the time it's just the patron him/herself sitting there with a finger up her nose and a shrug on her shoulders, and a comment along the lines of "they are around" in response to "where are the 12 members?", which more or less directly translates to "I have no idea where they are but I'm pretty sure they're alive".

UGH. Mobilization: my own personal hell.

And what's more fun is when, as in the case of this club, the patron decides that she think she'll get some sort of reward or service (read: handout) for getting these 12 members there. So, rather than being honest about not being able to get them all there, she lies and asks club members present to impersonate some of the 12 respondents who are not there. Charming. And it's usually pretty obvious, when after calling someone's name four times, someone elbows that "respondent" in the ribs and says "oh he is right here!" and that "respondent" looks profoundly confused and then brightens up and says "oh yeah, that's me". At least try to be cagey!

Sooooo I wound up having the joyful experience of pulling the patron outside and informing her that by instructing her club members to impersonate, she was violating the law and causing us to violate law as well. She was... unapologetic. But she did at least then agree to help identify who the actual respondents were, so I guess it was a net win.

Aaaaanyway. Back on track.

Pretty pretty scenery:

Wound up back at that second-story restaurant doing some work

Caught up with the other team later, unfortunately just as they were finishing the club. So we sat in the nice sunset light and did some survey review

Nothing quite like tucking a company-logo tee shirt into your jeans to make you feel like a real doofus

And then had some dinner at Mukwano Guesthouse (some of the best rice I've ever had... which I attribute to the presence of coriander seeds)

I decided I'd done my duty in Mbale, so it was time to rotate to another district - I'd head to Arua, Justin to Mbale and Charity to Mukono.

Bright and early

I caught a bus from Mbale to Kampala.

I'm not entirely sure why, but at one point we had to get off the bus, walk about 200m while the bus, empty, drove the same distance, and then re-board. Oooookay.

Saw a guy crawdad-fishing along the way

This guy boarded the bus at one of the stops and hawked some drugs for a while. See, you can tell his drugs are legit because he's wearing a lab coat!

The scary part is how many people bought from him.

At a gas-stop, I picked up some snacks, including one of my favorite local snacks, banana crisps... and apparently these ones are made by me! As a diet?

Four hours from Mbale to Kampala, hopped off the bus and zipped home for 20 minutes to take a shower and do the dirty-for-clean laundry-swap, then hopped aboard a bus for the eight hours to Arua.

Jeez, it looks like Africa!

Endless green plains

Upon arrival, met up with team leaders Innocent and George and auditor Ivan to get the low-down. Sounded like things were going generally well - good to hear! Also, as I later learned, not true.

Found my room at Jershem Hotel and sacked out for the night. Up bright and early (ugh) to meet up with the teams the next morning

More churches

Hung out with one team for a while, then hopped a boda to find the other team

While waiting at a trading center to wait for Ivan to come pick me up in the matatu, decided to have some local breakfast: chapati and incredibly over-sugared tea

Caught up with the other team and settled in to some survey-review

Churches...

Daniel gives Two Thumbs Up to local architecture!

Driving to the next survey site. Approaching 45 degrees:

Went for a walk through the village to meet up with the other team

Starting feeling a bit lost, so a local guy offered to help direct me. As we walked together he told me all about how some muzungu missionary had come and Christianized the whole area. Also, he reeked of booze.

At another point, I walked past a trio of young men, one of whom was holding a crying child. As I approached, the man holding the child looked at me then said something to the kid, resulting in raucous laughter from the other two men and a look of sheer terror from the kid. As I walked by, they informed me that they'd told the kid that if he didn't stop crying, the muzungu would "slaughter" him. Lovely! Scary part is that it worked... the kid shut up!

Found the other team at this remarkable "cathedral"

Nuns in Landcruisers!

Oil drum-cum-drum drum

Arua town

My life: reviewing surveys.

Upon reviewing surveys from the couple days before I arrived, I discovered that they were, in a word, abysmal. I mean, after a week of enumeration, I was still finding absolutely unacceptable errors - copious missed questions, totally incorrectly-coded responses, and all sorts of creative eff-ups that I hadn't even considered as possible.

We needed to send the completed surveys back to Kampala the next day, but sending down erroneous surveys would be... dumb. So, upon finishing the day's surveying at 4pm, I surprised the enumerators with the news that we'd be spending as long as necessary reviewing and correcting all mistakes in their surveys. They were... less than pleased.

Six hours. It took six hours for me to review every single one of the surveys' they'd completed up to that point. Because, as I started reviewing, I discovered that their surveys were so tragically and epically terrible that I needed to review EVERY SINGLE one. So we set up a little factory - me reviewing surveys, the team leaders and auditor arranging logistics, and the enumerators calling back damn near every one of their respondents to get clarification. Not the most fun evening I've had. Also not the most fun evening any of them have had. Let's call it "motivational" or "character building".

The evening also led to the first step in Daniel's growing reputation amongst Arua enumerators as quite the task-master.

Dickens leads the group behavioral games

Voter registration is currently on-going

Back towards town

No comment

On the rooooad agaaaain

Back to town in the middle of the day, I finally got a chance to have a run for the first time in weeks. Painful, but so good. Afterwards, had some millet, beef stew and bo (bitter greens in a kinda glop) with some passion fruit juice.

Amusingly, the TV in the lunch place was tuned to National Geographic, playing some American Cops-type show. It took me a few minutes to figure out what seemed weird about it, then I realized that I'm in the kind of place that Nat Geo usually features, watching a Nat Geo special on where I'm from. The irony!

Off to another church

While on the phone, checking in with teams in other districts, I went for a bit of a wander from the church we were at. Pretty amazing surroundings

Found a big rock overlooking some pretty amazing plains, and decided it would due as my office for the afternoon:

A funny trend: clubs we visited to survey giving us sodas. Could you imagine someone asking you to take 3 hours of your day to do a survey (with no compensation), and then you feeling so grateful that you offer them a refreshment? Hooray for cultural differences!

Sooo me and my Coke had a sit in a nice spot and spent entirely too much time on the phone.

I'm thinking about selling this picture to Coke

Walked back to check on the team. Set up my office on a fallen tree.

Okay, that's enough for now. Coming next time: Daniel faces a near strike and learns that being a disciplinarian sucks.

The chaos, uh, continuetheth?

Day 3. Moderately better than Day 2 (and as of today - Day 14 - the trend of slight improvements day-to-day has continued... with only a few hiccups).

Headed out in the AM with Tony's club. Failed to get our respondents at the first club (this has been a recurring theme, and an unending wellspring of Daniel's Anxiety), and learned that our matatu driver was a royal a-hole. Tony had gone with him to try to pick up some respondents in the matatu to bring them to the church where we'd be doing the surveying, and he apparently

A) whined non-stop about the condition of the roads and the wear on his vehicle (not any worse than any other roads, and we had contracted all of these matatus through a central guy who would be responsible for paying for any maintenance costs)

B) started jerking his foot on the gas/clutch in order to make it seem like he was running out of gas and whined about us not giving him enough gas

C) whined about us working him too hard (the length and breadth of his job involved driving us to meet with a club in the morning, then taking a nap, then driving us to meet with a second club, then taking a nap, then driving us home... God forbid we ask him to do 5 minutes more driving)

D) stopped the matatu at one point in order to call his boss right in front of Tony and loudly complain about the above points A) through C)

Tony got so fed up he just told him to go back and went the rest of the way by foot.

Aaaaanyway. We managed to get the second club to meet with us earlier than planned. And the scenery was... divine

Daniel's Anglican Church Tour of Uganda continues

John delivers the instructions for the group behavioral games(I should do a post sometime about some research theory.... and what the hell "behavioral games" are

One of the more finished churches I've been in lately

Threatening clouds

Hi neighbor!

Once I saw that things were rolling along smoothly enough, I decided to head back to town. I had the matatu driver take me much further along the way than necessary, mostly to show him that we weren't going to tolerate his crap, and then caught another matatu to town.

[Sidenote: on all matatus operating as "taxis" (these are privately-owned minivans operating along semi-fixed roots, so really more of "buses", yet confusingly called "taxis"... and then there "special hires" which are, uh, normal taxis), there is a broadly-painted statement that "This taxi is licensed to carry 14 passengers". I even noticed in a guide-book I'd skimmed shortly after arriving here the comment that the author "never saw a taxi carrying more than the licensed number of passengers". LIES! I can't even count how many times I've been one-cheeking it on a taxi seat, with between one and three total strangers' body parts entirely too intimately intertwined with my own. This day was a particularly lovely example: I counted 20 adults and 2 children in this taxi]

I had to do... something(s) in town but I can't remember what. Afterwards I posted up on the balcony of a 2nd-story restaurant for some lunch and work. I was famished, so did some pretty semi-rational ordering:

Tea

"Garlic mushroom toast" which I expected to be some sort of be-mushroomed garlic bread but turned out to be toasted sliced white bread with some sort of heavily garlicy (mmmm) mushroom-based gravy-mush

and

An "avocado salad" which turned out to be an avocado with some soy sauce poured on it, accompanied by a few slices of tomato.

That was about it for noteworthiness that day.

For the rest of the baseline-survey posts, I think I'm going to let them be more photo- and anecdote-driven, rather than trying to give a moment-by-moment blow-by-blow. On to the next...

The chaos continueth....

Oooookay. Where'd we leave off?

Right. Monday night found me drifting off to sleep (maybe "collapsing in a heap" would be more accurate), images of incompetent enumerators, grumpy respondents, frowning professors and pissed off donors dancing in my dreams.

Woooo. Hooo.

Monday night I'd actually slept at the flat of our auditor in Mbale, Dean, because all of my bags were still there from the morning and I couldn't bear the 15 minutes of sleep I would have lost by carrying my stuff back to the guesthouse I'd stayed at (where the team leaders were staying) the night before. By the time I woke up, Dean had already gone out, grabbed us some breakfast (a banana and a delightful variety of the many ways Ugandans have invented for frying dough) and brewed coffee. I considered proposing bestfriendship on the spot.

Bright and (painfully) early, Dean and I trudged to the team leaders' guest house, where the troops were rallying for Day Two.

Looking out behind the team leaders' room, where the cooks for the restaurant downstairs had an impressive chapati-production assembly line going:

I started the day with Tony's again, with Dean accompanying Katamba's crew. After everyone arriving already a bit late (with me sitting in the matatu anxiously waving my hands at nipple level) , we finally started moving only to pull right into a gas station. I almost lost my mind - why the hell hadn't they just filled up yesterday? I put the query to Tony, who explained that he'd been warned that if we put in more fuel than we needed for that day, the drivers would siphon it. Terrrrrific.

On the road:

I decided to try some incentivization, so I told the enumerators that the first one done (with minimal mistakes/errors) would earn him/herself a "bonus". Yay for cash solving all problems! Mobilizing the 12 respondents took a bit of time, complicated by the fact that there was a funeral for a local person about 100 feet away. The wailing of local women just out of sight nicely echoed the panicked alarm bells going off in my head, and harmonized nicely with my constantly-ringing mobile phone. It also led to one of my favorite enumerator notes I've so far seen on a survey: "there was a dead body nearby, which made it difficult to concentrate". Charming.

Once Tony had mobilized all 12 respondents, I set off to photocopy some more surveys, since we were already running out and the next batch wouldn't be coming from Kampala for another day.

I had the matatu drive me to the main road, and on our way some local old ladies flagged us down, assuming we were a standard fare-taking matatu. The driver looked at me questioningly and I said "sure, why not". The ladies boarded and immediately started laughing when they realized the situation. Well, despite the doom I felt my survey was spiraling towards, at least running Daniel's Old Lady Muzungu-Taxi Service earned me a bit of good karma.

In town I found a lady running a print/copy shop and, even though her machine looked alarmingly decrepit, she charmed me into customership with witty banter and low prices. Maybe not my wisest decision, considering it wound up taking her damn near 3 hours to print the 70 copies I needed of the 25-page survey! I decided to make the best of it and give my brain a few minutes away from the constant panicked alarm bells that had been ringing in my head for a few days. I wandered around until I found a little cafe that had some of the best "spiced African tea" (black tea + a ton of milk + even more sugar + uh... spices ("tea masala") ) I've yet had, as well as a lovely, albeit semi-obscured, view of the plateau that is Kapchorwa (where I was the day before) and Sipi Falls:

For some reason I've been on a taking-pictures-of-what-I'm-eating kick lately, even when it's just tea and a mandazi (one of Uganda's many variants of fried dough):

With printing finally finished, I headed out to meet up with Katamba's team. We met with a club pretty deep "in the village" (far out of town) and I settled down on the roots of a big tree to review the surveys from the morning.

while the enumerators spread themselves out around the grounds and got interviewing:

As I alternately reviewed surveys (becoming increasingly frustrated by prevalent enumerator mistakes) and harping on the enumerators to operate more efficiently, I realized what a bizarrely dissonant and incongruous experience I'd been having the past couple days. Here I was, surrounded by some of the most pastorally idyllic landscape I've ever seen, and flipping out about efficiency, data quality and proper protocol-following. All around me were the green environ and calm inhabitants of a life measured by season and generality, and I was obsessing about seconds and minutiae.

I'd love to say that this ephiphanic moment led to a sea-change in the Daniel Approach to Life (Or At Least This Job), but it didn't. I'm pretty sure that immediately after this realization, I found two missed questions on the survey I was reviewing and barked at an enumerator for wasting time. Maybe next time.

Well. Lest you think I'm just giving unnecessary air to my (at this point, copious) anxieties by obsessing about efficiency and timeliness, I had (okay, most - the pterodactyl-sized mosquitoes that haunt my dreams stayed away) all of my fears confirmed on Tuesday evening: we wound up at this damn club surveying until 10:30pm. Mind you:

A) the sun goes down at 7:00 like clockwork here

B) we were deep in the village... no electricity.

When we realized the inevitable onset of darkness (and plodding slowness of still-inexperienced enumerators), I hopped in the taxi on a desperate search for anything that shed light. 20 minutes later I returned with one fist full of candles and the other with some delightfully charming dual-LED-light-plus-pen-but-shaped-to-look-like-a-pair-of-cigarettes keychain flashlights, all for a grand total of about $10. Using all sources of light we could think of we wound up with a delightful mix of:

1) Enumerators surveying outside by keychain-flashlight (see those blue specks? those are people. working):

2) Enumerators surveying in the church by candlelight:

and 3) Leading the group behavioral games (essentially another part of the survey exercise) by the headlights of the matatu:

And your fearless narrator decided to join in on the fun, reviewing surveys hot off the press by candlelight in the church

It was admittedly a bit romantic, and would maybe even have been enjoyable if we all hadn't been working for 14 hours by this point, and if I hadn't been finding SO MANY DAMN MISTAKES.

Okay, still kind of rad to be working by candlelight in a church in rural Eastern Uganda while in the distance the faint roar of a waterfall provided a soundtrack and distant lightning storms occasionally lit up endless green fields at the horizon.

And, on the bright side, Dean (the Mbale auditor) made further strides in securing best-friend-for-life-ship by talking the landlady of his building into renting IPA a 1-room apartment for the 3 weeks of the survey for... 140,000 shillings. That's $70. For an apartment! Clean, with a bed, table and dresser, a fully functional (and clean) bathroom (though no hot water, alas). Dean loaned me sheets and pillows for the night, and the next day I went out and bought the most uncomfortable sheets I have ever felt (they felt more like a net made of sandpaper than bed-sheets) for $7.

This is the apartment the next morning. Yes, I do have this impressive an ability for making a mess overnight:

Okay, I'll leave it at that for the moment. We just left a club (in Arua presently) and the bumpy road is making typing-whilst-moving difficult.

More to come!