The Nuts and Bolts

Hello and welcome to post two. So far so good with keeping up with my blog.  Thanks for all of your support and encouragement!  

To begin with, most of you know that I have just returned from three weeks ‘in the field.’ I should qualify that term. I was not staying in a tent with mud floors. I was staying in a lodge with a private room, TV, mini-fridge, cleaning and laundry service, and intermittent hot water. (Actually, intermittent water in general. For the first time, my excuse for being late was ‘The water stopped and I was covered in soap and had to wait for it to come back on.’  I have never used THAT one before.) I just want to debunk any visions of me sleeping on a cot among lions. Nowhere near.  In fact, the first room I stayed in looked like, (and I am sorry for using this description with family and making you feel awkward, but there is NO other way to describe it) a scene from a really bad 1990’s adult movie. The picture is above, complete with mosquito net, but it doesn’t really do it justice.  Let’s just say the entire room was dark red (including plush carpet), and all the fabric was shiny, shiny, shiny. It also had a huge heart pillow studded with sequins among the 20 throw pillows on the bed.  Just saying.

So, to give some context to my field work, I am going to dedicate this blog post to giving a brief description of my project and my work for those of you who I haven’t already tortured with the details. (And Mark, because I know that you will NEVER get around to reading my protocol).  Then next post I can break into all of the fun stuff and you will know what I am talking about.  I apologize, it’s rather boring, but necessary to understand the context of my work.

My study is called the Longitudinal Study on Orphans and Vulnerable Children, or LOS for short. Let me break that down a little.

 Longitudinal means over time.

An orphan, in Africa, refers to any child that has lost EITHER parent. In fact whenever you are reading any orphan related statistic from the WHO, USAID, etc., you should keep in mind that they are using this definition. While this definition may seem to decrease the severity of the word ‘orphan’ in comparison to our definition, you must also understand that the context is different.  Consider the severe shortage of income generating activities available to any given household.  In the States a single parent can often manage to at least get by.  In Africa it could mean starvation. A child can be a paternal, maternal, or double orphan. As you can imagine in a country with a 1 in 5 HIV rate, there are a lot of these children.

 A vulnerable child is one who has HIV, or some other extenuating factor which increases their vulnerability.

Together, these children are referred to as OVC’s (Orphans and Vulnerable Children).

Caregiver and children in Kafue

This study is one of the first longitudinal studies on orphans in Africa. I am not sure that there have been any published results of a similar kind of study.  The main reason, I think, is that tracking the same children over time is very difficult.  We attempted to find the same children that were interviewed in the program evaluation conducted last year (more on this later) and it was very challenging. Just trying to match the names is near to impossible. Names are very fluid here. People have two to three names that they use interchangeably, plus names they use with muzungus (On the last day in the field I learned that one of my dear friends was Chisiah, not Maynard. Go figure).  In addition, spelling is purely phonetic. This means it can change depending who is writing it down and how they hear it. R’s and L’s are mixed up as a rule. So, Lejoi and Rejoi...same person.  So, one thinks, let’s just look at the birthday. Also problematic.  Of the 200 or so children that we did track from the last study, there were about 5 with the same birthdays as they listed a year ago. Most were off by at least a year. My feelings on the effects of not tracking age I will save for another post. (Hint: I like it). So, to get back to the point, it is difficult and time consuming to track these children over time. Therefore most studies that look at the conditions of orphans are cross-sectional, a one-time evaluation that really only yields results of association, not cause.

Moving on. The goal of the study is two-fold. The first is a kind of evaluation. When Bush, in a rare moment of insight (apologies to those in Florida and Texas), gave Africa millions of dollars in aid, he did so under the Presidents Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. This is commonly known as PEPFAR. In Zambia, this was distributed through a program called Expanded Church Response. Essentially, money to assist OVCs was funneled through local churches because they already play such a vital role in Zambian communities. Christianity is actually written into the Zambian constitution, and Zambians are very religious as a rule.  

Last year, at the end of the first five year PEPFAR grant, my office conducted an evaluation of the program to see how orphans were faring in comparison to other children. This was a cross sectional study, with rudimentary results. Thus, my study was funded by PEPFAR in order to create a cohort of children that we can follow over time, to truly understand what is going on. This is an extension of the evaluation in some ways, but is also designed to better understand the different levels of vulnerability in orphans compared to regular children. It looks at six domains: Education, Health, Nutrition, Security, Shelter, and Psycho-social development. Socioeconomic Status is kind of an all-encompassing seventh domain.  So far, it seems the differences are substantial.

Half of the team before departing.

The study consists of quantitative and qualitative methods. For quantitative, we trained about 19 quantitative data collectors to conduct interviews on random selected beneficiaries of the funded church’s services. For those of you who are interested, we are using the Teleform software. They then find three comparison children within the community of the same gender and age range. In all, there were around 1300 households interviewed, and each interview takes about an hour. It was quite an undertaking. We split into two teams and went three locations, Kafue, Chingola, and Luanshya (see map.) I went south to Kafue, and then met up with the entire team in Luanshya.  My part in the quantitative research consisted of keeping an up to date electronic database in Excel and tracking all of the follow-ups we had to do, as well as reviewing questionnaires for completion.

Room for Focus Group Discussion.

I am the team leader of the qualitative research. I work with two amazing Zambian women, Helen and Nomsa, to conduct Focus Group Discussions regarding the program and people’s living conditions. I got to train them on my third day in Africa. Note: I have NEVER conducted qualitative research or Focus Groups. Read the appropriate section of the guide the night before each training day. However, we managed. Helen and Nomsa essentially kept me alive and safe, and were my guides throughout my experience. I got to go places I never would have gone alone because of them. We spent A LOT of time together, and I love them both dearly.

This is the 'road' where one of our participants lived.

Each Focus Group consisted of arranging logistics (such as driving around on bumpy roads for three hours in the hottest part of the day in a 4WD with no air conditioning), Helen and Nomsa conducting the FGD (Focus Group Discussion) for an hour and a half, then spending countless hours listening to the recording and translating the discussion in my hotel room.  I have learned that transcription puts me to sleep faster than any sleeping pill. Incredibly tedious. 

That is the brief overview of the study and my job description in the field, and enough for one post! Tristan and Gabrielle, the next post will have some pictures of my house.

Love to all!

The Muzungu Effect

Hello friends and family! Welcome to my new form of communication. Perhaps now that I have an official blog with a fancy name I will be better about writing. Nobody keep their hopes up, but I am feeling inspired. I figure that in two years I’ll get a book deal and leading role opposite Meryl Streep.

The Muzungu Effect:

It is a well-known fact that when you travel you often learn more about where you are coming from than where you are going.  It is kind of like being able to look through someone else’s eyes at yourself, but on a cultural level. That said, let me share with you my latest observations of our wonderful country, as it relates to the title of my soon to be famous blog.  What makes America (and other Western countries) unique from the rest of the developing world is that when you are standing at the back of a crowd and you look forward, everyone’s hair is different.  Seriously, number one difference.  You don’t realize how unusual this is until you are in a crowd where everyone is African (or Indian or Thai or Hispanic....you get the idea). I literally think that the most noticeable difference between the developing and the Western World  are the moments at the back of the crowd, when all the heads in front of you look the same. The whole 'melting pot' thing is not a joke.

This brings me to the title of my blog. You can imagine, given my observation, that in Africa I stand out. Just a bit. Not only am I white, I am whiter than the average white (some have said that I glow).  Thus, as a background to anything that I am doing, you must imagine that everyone is looking at me, or at least aware of my actions. There is never a second that there is not someone watching me. I went to a large and busy market the other day with two friends, and getting split up from each other was not a big concern, because at any time, any person could tell you where the other muzungus were (although the amount of grabby hands was an incentive to get together). They are just aware of your presence and your actions at all times.

Obviously, people often treat you differently, for better or for worse.  The obvious: I am immediately considered rich, which means I am immediately a target for begging, both overt and subtle.  Other effects? I am immediately a bad dancer. I clearly need protection from the hardships of African life, and I can clearly pay about twice as much for those tomatoes than my friend Helen. There is definitely some resentment, and I have definitely been taunted in the field (there is a traditional belief in rural areas that white development workers are Satanists). I was also flipped off by a 10 year old in front of my whole team.  It took all my self-control not to do it back and stick my tongue out. You’ll be happy to know that at the age of 25, I resisted.  However, there are also good things, and amusing things. No one ever forgets my order in a restaurant. When I call a taxi driver from last night, all I have to say is ‘I’m the Muzungu you picked up last night,’ and he immediately knows where to find me. And I am automatically perceived as an expert in just about anything. Oh….and yes, all muzungus look alike. No joke.  

 These things I have collectively termed 'The Muzungu  Effect,'  and it has become vernacular among my Zambian team members (who have been quite amused by the antics we have encountered) and among my fellow muzungu friends. You can also have a Double and Triple Muzungu Effects (DME or TME) depending on what else you are doing that is completely against cultural norms. For example, consider if I were to go running.  First, I am white. Muzungu Effect. Secondly, I am a white woman wearing exercise clothes. Double Muzungu Effect (DME). Third, I am running  in a place where NO ONE runs. Triple Muzungu Effect (TME). Thus we can rate our questionable activities rather well.

The wonderful thing about The Muzungu Effect is that it just keeps growing. Every day I discover something new. And while it is a phrase coined in humor, it also has a very serious roots because every time I discover an aspect of The Muzungu Effect, I am also getting closer to understanding an aspect of Zambian culture as it truly is, and not as a foreigner would see it. In other words, by being aware of the differences in treatment, I am at least being aware that of the ways in which my experience is not the norm. Thus I thought that it would be an appropriate name for my blog, as hopefully I will learn more and more about Zambian culture as it is, and not as a foreign tourist.

Stay tuned. To part, some pictures, because everyone loves pictures:

This was my favorite place to buy vegetables on the road from Luanshya to Lusaka.

One dollar buys a whole bowl of whatever they are selling.

 And closer to home, this is my food cabinet as of right now, the 15th of February. With my off hours schedule it has been hard to make it to the market. Thus the past two days of consisted of coffee, bread and peanut butter, and beans.

This is worse than college....

Love to all!