My Life as an Intern: Survey Nerd

After a week of orientation in September where I got to hang out with the various departments at Kitovu Mobile (Counselling, Palliative Care, Home-Based Care, Orphans and Family Support), I was placed within the Orphans and Family Support department to begin working on a community empowerment project.

My task: to do a baseline assessment of a rural village (Kyango Bigavu) near Kyotera within which Kitovu Mobile would like to start implementing programs. It was a bit daunting at first since I had to design the survey tool and I pretty much needed and wanted to ask about everything with regards to the socio-economic and political conditions as the villagers saw it. So, after fighting with the wording of and types of questions about a variety of topics (e.g. household demographics, economic factors, health conditions, HIV/AIDS knowledge, social supports, gender-based violence), paring it down as much as possible (because nobody wants to administer or participate in a 12 page questionnaire!), and having it triple checked by 3 different people for cultural appropriateness (which can be trickier than one may think), I was ready to try it out with the community worker. Ssempiira Cornelius, the community worker, had been tapped to work with the Mzungu volunteer. Cornelius is fantastic, by the way. Smart, hard-working, dedicated, skilled, and personable. I couldn't have asked for a better partner!

A typical day going out into the village looked something like this:

I would grab a ride in a truck with a team from Kitovu Mobile who was passing through Kyotera. In Kyotera, they would drop me off at a bus stage and we would very loosely plan a pick-up time at the end of the day. Cornelius would meet me at the bus stage and we would head into and through the village on a motorbike. If it was raining, we would stop and wait out the rain since the 'roads' (I use the term very loosely, here) would have turned into rivers of mud -- not exactly good motorbiking conditions as we learned on one occasion. :)

Cornelius and the motorbike

We then visited various families at their homes where I would interview people, with Cornelius translating everything. I managed to figure out how to ask people for their names and ages in Luganda; I also figured out how to ask the random question, like "how many chairs do you have?" and "do you boil your water?". But I relied primarily on Cornelius. I found that I was able to understand more of the language than I was able to speak, which helped move things along. Each interview took about 40 minutes to an hour to complete. This was partly because of the number of questions we asked and partly because there is a sort of greeting ritual we had to do with each household. I thought I was starting to get pretty good at doing this, although it always seemed to make people laugh (I'd probably laugh at me, too, if I were them!).

Homemade snuff (it's spicy!)

The majority of the people we met with were lovely. They were fairly open to discussing some aspects of some issues (thanks to Cornelius). Some were embarrassed to discuss certain things with me and I get that, but all in all the people I managed to meet with were great at allowing me to gain some insight into their lives. I must say that despite being a village that has been neglected by the various levels of government (National, District, Sub-county, etc.) and despite facing hugely daunting issues that hinder their development (food security and access to water, as examples), you could see the resilience within the community and for some of them, the pride they had in the things they made or grew. I loved doing the household interviews. As dull as it sounds to survey a village, because of the loose-ish format we adopted, it was an overall enjoyable experience.

The lovely Mulindwa Rose, presenting me with a mat 
to welcome me to the community

We always started out by letting people know who we were, which organization we were with, what we wanted to do, the purpose of surveying people from this village, and telling people we were there to learn from them.We never made promises and we tried to be clear that at this stage, we were just gathering information which we would then take back to people who might be able to figure out a way to address some of the issues. This was key and even with this reminder, expectations still got a bit muddled.

*** A tangent (of course) ...
I'm learning that in community development (and likely any work that is done in a developing country), you need to manage expectations: your own and everyone else's. People sometimes automatically assume that because you are showing an interest, all their problems will be solved. This feeling is amplified when the worker is a Mzungu. My own expectations coming into this project were to learn as much as I could about community development and empowerment, doing a community assessment, to interact with as many people as I could, and to hopefully be helpful in some way (even a small way). Thankfully, that attitude worked out fairly well (Robo-Tan in Uganda!). I'm not there to wipe away their problems or to 'save the world'. I can't and I shouldn't expect to be able to in just over 3 months. To want to do so may sound admirable and desirable, but in reality (and in my opinion), that's just arrogant. Secondly, going in with that bent has the potential to lead to a dependent relationship that doesn't foster capacity-building and is not sustainable in the long run because at the end of the day, I'm not living there with them and in these conditions. So, any development project that happens really does need to be community-driven for it to be sustainable and viable in the long run.
                                                                                          ... End of tangent (for now) ***

At the end of the day, Cornelius would take me back to the bus stage where I would wait for the team I came up with to pick me up and bring me back to Masaka. Sometimes I would wait up to an hour or more. Have I mentioned that time moves differently in Uganda? During my waits, I started sitting with a woman who makes and sells local street food. She would speak to me in rapid Luganda. And wait. I would shrug my shoulders. She would slow down and use more hand gestures. I would sort of get the gist of what she was saying and respond in broken Luganda and English with a lot of my own hand gestures. She would laugh. Eventually, the truck would come and with a final laugh at each other and a "Webale!" (Thank you) for letting me sit at her food station, I crammed myself into the truck and headed back to Masaka.