Busy, busy, busy!

The end of last week was crazy! Julian, the PI on our project arrived, and we spent most of Friday going through the survey on a macro and micro level. We still have a few big decisions to make, namely the survey size! The "power" and budget of our study will vary based on the number of people we track down from the baseline and the number of new people we decide to survey. We originally surveyed 30 people in each of 60 trading centers, and we seem to be leaning toward 20 old respondents and 20 new respondents in each trading center for our endline study. A bigger sample size would generate greater "power" and confidence in our results, but it would be a logistical nightmare. What good is a greater sample size if the accuracy of the surveys goes down?

We went through the survey piece by piece until late on Friday night and then went out to dinner at a pretty good (but horrible service!) Indian restaurant. On Saturday, Julian, Kareem, Pia, Charity (field manager), Nester (our auditor), Prossie (other/new field manager), Margaret (head of the enumerators) and I headed out to Mpigi to pretest the survey on non-Kampala Ugandans. Pre-testing proved very fruitful and we gained a lot of insight into ways to better our survey, which is good. I also went to the bathroom for the first time in a hole in the ground! However, the bathrooms were surprisingly well-engineered--they didn't smell and the hole in the floor was sloped appropriately to ensure that all bodily matter ended up in its proper place.

It is still very hard to see the poverty that people live in--more so in a village where the overall wealth is much lower than the poor parts of Kampala. You see pictures on TV and read about impoverished Africa in books, but it didn't prepare me at all for being there in person. It was particularly striking to see how similar people were to people in the U.S. Even though they didn't have shoes and had a house the size of my bedroom for 8 people, the kids still giggle when I stuck my tongue out at them and the women complain about their husband/boyfriend's wandering eyes (among other things...infidelity is quite rampant here). There's not really much to say about the poverty. I wish I could do something about it, but as Catherine (one of my yoga friends) says, the people of Africa need to help themselves. A bunch of Western money may help temporarily but does nothing to permanently change the underlying problems.

Anyway, after a few long days, I had Sunday off! I went to a great yoga class and stayed after for cake and coffee, followed by grocery shopping and an afternoon at the Kabira Club filled with swimming, reading, a massage, and steaming/sauna-ing. Verrrrrry nice :) I tried gooseberries for the first time, which are like small, tart tomatoes and are absolutely delicious! I also had some chocolate biscuits, which were so-so on their own but amazing dipped in coffee. Everybody seems to eat biscuits here, which are a cross between crackers and cookies. They aren't particularly good or bad, but they serve its purpose and I don't get a tummyache from them (I am suffering from one right now after a small piece of questionable beef/goat/something meat at lunch). After Kabira, I had a nice video chat session with Eric and did a little more work/saw the movie Avatar. I liked it a lot, although I like most sci-fi movies. We saw it in a restaurant/club that happened to have a big movie screen--a bit random, but it works!

This week looks to be another big week, filled with survey finalizations and training preparations (enumerator training got pushed back until Sunday). I'm also helping a number of classmates prepare for case interviews, which I am happy to do. I hope that my mentees land great internships! Hopefully, I will get to go to a few yoga classes and get some thesis-ing in between everything.