This past week was pretty quiet. I did data work almost all week (Tuesday to Thursday), working a few days from my room, just plugging away. It seems silly to do something like that here when it could be done easily at home, but it sort of needed to happen and was a good break and time to plan for the next trip to the field.
The data entry was tedious to be sure, but I think I actually set up a good system for what I needed to do. Although, if culture shock is an accumulation of small things, realizing how much I rely on being able to get just about any computer program I want from school was one this week. I'm doing all of this data work in excel, coding open ended survey responses and some quantitative stuff too in a worksheet so you can sort it. It's such a small thing, and it actually works quite well to pull up different codes, but it's the small things that I take for granted. When I think about working in "resource-scarce settings", I don't think about how you do any of your work without a computer full of all different kinds of software. I was going to download a trial version of one of the programs I normally would have used, but it would have taken hours and hours to download (and see earlier post about the internet in town...).
Good company made the evenings good fun. Heather and Emily, two of the Penn crew, came back to Mchinji since their project is still waiting for the Malawi IRB (the ethics board) to approve the study. It was good to have them back, and with Lauren who I hung out with a lot the prior week, we made a good group. Which includes us as a team of chefs: we cooked really good food every night.
Menu planning surrounded what we had in stores and the market in the boma, the abundance of non-perishables that Lauren brought (she was here last year and knew what to bring), and some things that they picked up in Blantyre (like foccacia) the previous weekend. In fact, some of the vegetables came from the bus ride back, like the peas that went into the skilled chicken. [People are selling food anytime you stop at major destination points (which could be any town along the road, really); sometimes it's quite aggressive, with vendors rushing the minibus door and windows and other times they're just there quietly. It happens a lot while you're waiting in the bus stations, too--anything from DVDs to ice cream (sold from totally unrefridgerated wood boxes). I liken it to SkyMall for minibuses. Except people actually buy things from it. Like, as you pull away, you realize that everyone suddenly is eating a hard boiled egg, an orange, peanuts, popcorn, or whatever else was for sale at the time.] We also tried making tortillas for mexican, which really didn't work (we think we bought the wrong flour), and ended up having these weird doughy chips and making taco salads. The tricky thing about cooking is that the power tends to go out right around the time that we're cooking, so we often have to transfer from the stove to the cooking fires outside. If I go camping anytime soon, my repertoire of meals-on-the-fire has greatly increased.
Our nightly ritual after dinner is to watch an episode of South Park on Lauren's computer. Heather and Lauren stopped to talk to someone on the way back to Lauren's room one night (which is like 30 feet from the kitchen), and got attacked by ants along the way. In the three minutes they were there, these ants got all over Heather's legs and skirt. They bit and stung, hard. We quickly realize that they're everywhere, and upon close inspection, you can see that they have these little claw-like things on their front that are definitely the biters. By the time South Park was over, they'd overtaken Emily and Heather's room and all the staff was out, trying to extinguish them. The inn owner, Mrs Andeson, warned Emily with a few facts about these ants, most notably that they have been known to kill elephants and can get in your "soft spots." Gross. There were fortunately none in my room (I saw one the following morning, but no more), but the three of them had to camp out in Lauren's room for shelter. Apparently they come when there's a lot of water, like the rainy season or when the grass and flowers are generously watered in the dry season, as they have been doing around the inn.
That same night, two people from HSPH were in town and checking out Kayesa for a project they're doing in October. The inn was full so they had to put up at Joe's Motel, where the condition of the accommodations shortened their stay from 5 days to 2. I felt bad for them, but did chat with them while they were at Kayesa for a bit before dinner to meet Farah and catch up a bit with Sam. I'd run into Sam on the street in Lilongwe the previous week, and then again this Friday when I bumped into him in the hotel we're staying at in Lilongwe (we realized that we were in rooms next to each other). There's a very powerful azungu magnet here, that's for sure.
This week: data, food, ants, and Americans. A good week for sure.
The data entry was tedious to be sure, but I think I actually set up a good system for what I needed to do. Although, if culture shock is an accumulation of small things, realizing how much I rely on being able to get just about any computer program I want from school was one this week. I'm doing all of this data work in excel, coding open ended survey responses and some quantitative stuff too in a worksheet so you can sort it. It's such a small thing, and it actually works quite well to pull up different codes, but it's the small things that I take for granted. When I think about working in "resource-scarce settings", I don't think about how you do any of your work without a computer full of all different kinds of software. I was going to download a trial version of one of the programs I normally would have used, but it would have taken hours and hours to download (and see earlier post about the internet in town...).
Good company made the evenings good fun. Heather and Emily, two of the Penn crew, came back to Mchinji since their project is still waiting for the Malawi IRB (the ethics board) to approve the study. It was good to have them back, and with Lauren who I hung out with a lot the prior week, we made a good group. Which includes us as a team of chefs: we cooked really good food every night.
Menu planning surrounded what we had in stores and the market in the boma, the abundance of non-perishables that Lauren brought (she was here last year and knew what to bring), and some things that they picked up in Blantyre (like foccacia) the previous weekend. In fact, some of the vegetables came from the bus ride back, like the peas that went into the skilled chicken. [People are selling food anytime you stop at major destination points (which could be any town along the road, really); sometimes it's quite aggressive, with vendors rushing the minibus door and windows and other times they're just there quietly. It happens a lot while you're waiting in the bus stations, too--anything from DVDs to ice cream (sold from totally unrefridgerated wood boxes). I liken it to SkyMall for minibuses. Except people actually buy things from it. Like, as you pull away, you realize that everyone suddenly is eating a hard boiled egg, an orange, peanuts, popcorn, or whatever else was for sale at the time.] We also tried making tortillas for mexican, which really didn't work (we think we bought the wrong flour), and ended up having these weird doughy chips and making taco salads. The tricky thing about cooking is that the power tends to go out right around the time that we're cooking, so we often have to transfer from the stove to the cooking fires outside. If I go camping anytime soon, my repertoire of meals-on-the-fire has greatly increased.
Our nightly ritual after dinner is to watch an episode of South Park on Lauren's computer. Heather and Lauren stopped to talk to someone on the way back to Lauren's room one night (which is like 30 feet from the kitchen), and got attacked by ants along the way. In the three minutes they were there, these ants got all over Heather's legs and skirt. They bit and stung, hard. We quickly realize that they're everywhere, and upon close inspection, you can see that they have these little claw-like things on their front that are definitely the biters. By the time South Park was over, they'd overtaken Emily and Heather's room and all the staff was out, trying to extinguish them. The inn owner, Mrs Andeson, warned Emily with a few facts about these ants, most notably that they have been known to kill elephants and can get in your "soft spots." Gross. There were fortunately none in my room (I saw one the following morning, but no more), but the three of them had to camp out in Lauren's room for shelter. Apparently they come when there's a lot of water, like the rainy season or when the grass and flowers are generously watered in the dry season, as they have been doing around the inn.
That same night, two people from HSPH were in town and checking out Kayesa for a project they're doing in October. The inn was full so they had to put up at Joe's Motel, where the condition of the accommodations shortened their stay from 5 days to 2. I felt bad for them, but did chat with them while they were at Kayesa for a bit before dinner to meet Farah and catch up a bit with Sam. I'd run into Sam on the street in Lilongwe the previous week, and then again this Friday when I bumped into him in the hotel we're staying at in Lilongwe (we realized that we were in rooms next to each other). There's a very powerful azungu magnet here, that's for sure.
This week: data, food, ants, and Americans. A good week for sure.
Labels: malawi, mchinji, professional ramblings
Thank goodness there were no ants in your room!!!!