Interviewing is difficult if you don't speak the language...

For those of you who wonder what I've been doing... The program we're evaluating here is one that has community health workers (CHWs) treating children for a few specific diagnoses. There are approximately 60 000 CHWs of them here in Rwanda, one male and one female elected from each village (ostensibly). The diagnoses for the most part are diarrhea, pneumonia and fever, which is usually interpreted as malaria and treated as such rightly or wrongly. The CHWs also are involved in vaccinations and anemia screening (with de-worming medications as needed...your infectious diseases interesting fact of the day: the leading cause of anemia worldwide is hookworm infection - yep, may I point out once again, everything really is infectious diseases - love it!!). For those of you in the Global public health/pediatric fields - it's actually Rwanda's WHO IMCI program. So, the evaluation is to see how the process is working - not so much if it's really impacting the child mortality rate. It consists of interviews with randomly selected CHWs, revision of all their case files, and interviews with all the supervisors in over half of the health districts in Rwanda. (About 1200 interviews in total over the course of one week)

It was somewhat chaotic.

The teams got rearranged at the last minute so suddenly my boss and I were having to supervise a team of people we didn't know in an area that my boss didn't know. Plus there was problems with cash flow (as there often is) in order to arrange transportation and sundry other issues. Such is the fun of on the ground research like this. It's all about going with the flow basically and changing plans about 10 times a day. We pretty much accomplished our goal though. It was tricky as my boss and I could do only a handful of the interviews so we had to make the rest of the team work harder.

Interviews

Community Health Centre in rural Rwanda

The beautiful courtyard of the district hospital in Kibagabaga (which is pronounced exactly as written and is likewise my new favourite word. It sounds like it should belong in Bedrock)>

On our way to/from remote community health centres to do the interviews. I got the front seat because I was "the healthiest" (Rwandan description). A.K.A "the biggest". (This is apparently a huge compliment and I'm trying to take it as such - however, I have been somewhat brainwashed by negative aspects of western culture and had to do some mini-self-cognitive therapy with respect to body image.)

Fun week!! More later.

For all my nieces who want princess beds...come to Africa and you can sleep in a fancy bed just like this one: