The district capital. It may not look like much, but you could buy bottled water and get some fruit.
I bought two kilo of lychees — Saka wanted to watch me buy something on my own in the market — and then we all shared them in the truck, throwing the rinds into the fields as the road went pitchblack. Felt happy.
On our way home (click to see high res photo, though these are not great photos).
Anonymous asked: Hello Same Same. Are you enjoying the touch of silk and how does it differ to paper?
A message!!!
Well micnic, when I did go to the bathroom behind the house the housewife offered me a silk scarf to wipe with. But I didn’t take it of course. I came prepared with fazzoletti that I still carry in my purse from Rome. So the answer to your message is I don’t know.
I tried to get as many animals as possible in one photo, not sure if I managed. But there were chickens, pigs, dogs, people, goats, all hanging out in the shade of the same house. We had to wait here a while for it to be four o’clock (so that a full 24 hours would pass to ensure accurate measurement) so I watched a whole parade of species circle the same patch of shade.
Households teeming with life on the edge.
Sometimes I take photos of dogs to show Maude and teach her not to be so spoiled and finicky about everything, but then I remember she is just a dachsie and doesn’t look closely at pictures.
But everytime I look at this little puppy, I vow to be less spoiled myself.
Teenage parents. The mother is 16 and the father is 20. They married when she was 15, and now they have a two week old baby who was coughing. They let me hold the baby for a while and she was hot.
In the survey, we found out that they have the “ID Poor” card, which gives them rights to some social services. I don’t know how they’d get down to town to make good on the card’s benefits, but somehow all the other houses with rain water and sparrows for dinner didn’t make the cut. Not to depress you further, but the mom had an open sore on her neck. I broke researcher protocol again — justified as such: I will never go back there, I won’t use this village as data anyway, and she’s smart enough not to tell others. I gave her 10,000 riehl (the equivalent of 2.5 dollars) pointing to her baby. She knew what to do, she grabbed the money and hid it. Nobody saw but us.
I realize this blog reads like a laundry list of bad research practice (or not quite, but a little bit). I’m reading this book on Rural Development “Putting the Last First” about different types of outsiders — the advocacy outsiders, the expert interventionist, and the observers. I am supposed to be an observer, charged with making changes eventually in the world through a slow, steady, reasoned approach — but it’s hard to have patience for research in the face of grinding need and gross inequality.
At least they have a water filter.
When the monsoon starts, you just have to wait underneath the stilted house. So we played with my autotimer.
The whole series turned out poorly but every child did get a chance at pushing the button.
Dealing with disappointment (click to see full-size images).
So, this house was a special case because — after driving that bad road for hours and then trudging over in the heat — we saw that the family had not used any of the water for boiling, and only a little for drinking. There was nothing to measure.
At first the researchers were annoyed, thinking that the family hadn’t understood the directions (i.e. only use water in the buckets). But then the mom came and explained that they’d been collecting firewood for the past day, and as such they built a camp in the forest. They couldn’t bring buckets of water out to the forest just for a water survey test.
It was not lost on me that the Gold Standard designed this test, and that a few years back I was in a cool high ceilinged office in Geneva complaining about the quality of the espresso in Switzerland and writing letters to project developers telling them that their test results were not up to snuff. Now I see what goes into doing the water test.
People were upset. We sat there for about half an hour just taking in the news, and while we waited, something else disappointing happened. A jingling cart came by with syrup and ice, and for some reason every child got to have an icee except one, who just started bawling and bawling.
I’ve taken a few research methods courses at this point and I know better than to interfere with my field site, but at that point I couldn’t take the sad faces of the researchers and the sad face of that kid. So I bought her an icee and that was that.
