maggie in malawi

Research Update

2011-07-01T22:58:00.001-07:00

Greetings from Balaka! It has now been two weeks since I left California, and while I very much miss my bay area family, it has been really nice to reconnect with all of my friends here in Balaka.

Sorry for not updating this for such a long time, but things are very busy at work these days. I have been training my team of four interviewers, and making changes to the interview guide. While I’m here, I’m working mainly on a set of in-depth interviews, which is different from a survey in that we ask open-ended questions and the respondent does most of the talking. While surveys are great for many questions, in-depth interviewers allow respondents to tell stories and speak openly about their opinions. A really great interview is a joy to read, and a batch of several interviews can tell a researcher a lot about how people think and feel about an issue, in a deeper way than even the most well-designed survey.

The open-ended nature of in-depth interviews, however, also means that it is a challenge to train interviewers. The questionnaire that we have spent the past few weeks developing is by nature just a guide, and interviewers must feel comfortable straying from the questions printed on the page in order to follow up on stories that the respondent tells. Often respondents will answer questions before they are asked, and some questions will be inappropriate for certain respondents. It is a subtle art, and very much an expression of individual personalities and styles, so a trick that works for one person will come across as forced or fake for another. Add to that the fact that both the respondents and the interviewers have a totally different cultural background than me, and the fact that I have virtually no experience managing more than one person at a time, and you can imagine how much I have learned through this process of training the interviewers.

Luckily, I inherited an amazing team; one that already had some experience with this kind of work. They have already been working as in-depth interviewers for about 5 months. So while I had to teach them about the kinds of questions I’m interested in studying, they already knew something about how to conduct interviews. So I was reinforcing what they already knew rather than starting from scratch.

We spent several days “interviewing” each other as a way to practice and tinker with the questionnaire, which turned out to be a really great way to get to know each other, since the interviews are for the most part autobiographical. Ellie came in one day and they interviewed her, since she would be an “eligible” respondent if she were Malawian. She is within the age range I am targeting and is still in school. This interview led to a very interesting conversation about how the American education system works and how it is different in Malawi.

In particular, one of the things that I have been very struck by on this trip is the fact that the high school leaving exam is the exclusive pathway into college. This exam, called the MSCE, is being held this week. In the office where I work, a total of 6 people are taking the MSCE (the secondary school leaving exam) this week. All of them have been out of secondary school for at least 5 years, all are employed as interviewers or data assistants, have worked for TLT for at least a year, and thus have more knowledge about research than many college graduates. Yet they are spending their evenings studying high school text books, subjects that they passed successfully many years ago, in order to have a chance to go to university. This seems like a terrible waste of human capital to me, and the fact that nothing else makes any difference in determining whether a person is accepted into the university (job experience, other post-secondary degrees and diplomas, perormance in class).

If you don’t do well on the exam (even one subject can disqualify you from all university programs), or if you are just not within the lucky 10% of students with high scores who are selected to go to one of the public universities, your two options for going to college are to pay a lot more money and attend one of the private universities (which are typically of lower quality) or return to secondary school and try again. Even in the middle of one’s career, if you want to get a degree, it is necessary to go back to the last year of secondary school.

the trip to Balaka

2011-07-01T22:57:00.000-07:00

Ellie and I arrived in Lilongwe on Sunday, after a very long but uneventful flight. Ellie is working for an organization called IKI, and they had offered to come and pick us up from the airport. Unfortunately, I think both of us thought the other person had written down contact numbers for the folks at IKI. We emerged from the baggage claim through a sea of Malawians (mostly men) holding signs like WELCOME WORLD VISION TEAM! and FAITH IN FRIENDS WE ARE HEAR FOR YOU and EDITH. We looked for one that said "Ellie" or "Maggie" or "IKI," but nobody seemed to be there. Of course it would have been easy to take a cab into Lilongwe, but we weren't sure if somebody was coming and didn't want to leave somebody waiting at the airport for us. So we made our own sign, which said "IKI Ellie and Maggie" and held it up, sitting dejectedly with our pile of bags. After a few minutes, we noticed a white man starting and pointing at us. He came over and it turned out he knew IKI and put us in touch with Augustine, who is a friend of mine from 2008 when we worked together. Augustine called his friend to come and get us, and he drove us to a hotel. We stayed the night there, instead of trying to take a bus to Balaka (a 3 hour trip) since it was now getting late.

The next morning, while we were eating breakfast, Augustine showed up at our hotel. He had found a car for us, but they were searching for fuel. While fuel is always short in Malawi, recently it has been worse, and there are long lines of cars and trucks waiting for fuel. There was no diesel at any of the gas stations in Lilongwe, and he would have to find it on the black market if we were to go to Balaka. We gave him a little money (since black market fuel is much more expensive) and waited to hear back from him. About 3 hours later, he came back with the car and driver, and we piled our bags in the back and set off for Balaka.

Our driver was very nice and we chatted almost the whole time, mostly about all of the political turmoil in Malawi in recent months. People are really worried about this, everyone keeps saying that Malawi is returning to a dictatorship and it is as bad as it was in Banda’s time. The issue that he mostly talked about was what happened a few months ago when Bingu (the president) kicked out the British ambassador, who had criticized his presidency in a memo that was leaked. The British ambassador had said that Bingu was becoming increasingly autocratic, and Bingu responded by asking him to leave the country. In response, Britain kicked out the Malawian ambassador and threatened to pull all state-funded aid from the country. As Malawi’s largest donor, this was a grave threat. Already, many private donors have pulled out hteir funds, citing concerns over the ruling party. As the driver said, “even the people in the villages were shouting at Bingu for kicking out the ambassador.” He said that “Malawi has a long history of friendship with England, and it is very important for our future.”

After about an hour, we were pulled over by police, who accused us of speeding and charged the driver with a 5,000 Kwacha speading ticket (about $30). The driver was very upset, and I asked if he thought it would help if I got out of the car and talked to the cops (there were four of them). He said yes, so I got out of the car and went over to them and greeted them with my best Chichewa and my widest smile. After talking a bit about where I am from and what I am doing here in Malawi, I asked the cop who had been talking to the driver to explain what the problem was. I told him that my friend was a very good driver and I didn’t think we had been speeding, only that he had caught us as we were going down a hill. The cop replied that it is a driver’s responsibility to control the car as it goes down the hill, and I said, ok, maybe, but can we just get away with a warning, since this is the first time that he has had any problem with speeding? He replied that maybe he could just lower the fine, and he made it 3,000 kwacha (about $17).

After we went on our way again, about 20 km down the road, we encountered a speed bump that had just been installed (or so the driver said). He hadn’t noticed the signs warning us about the bump, and we were driving at least 80 km per hour, so it was quite a bump. It seemed like the car was driving ok, but a half hour later it started making a strange sound, and we pulled over. When he looked in the hood, he saw that the belt had come off due to the impact of the speed bump. He rigged a temporary fix and we set off again. Unfortunately he hadn’t closed the hood properly because about 10 minutes later the hood suddenly flew open and completely blinded the windshield. We all screamed, and the driver pulled over and thank god there was nobody on the side of the road (this is rare in Malawi, where a constant stream of people walk and ride bikes along the highways).

We made it home without further incidents, and were very happy to get out of the car, despite the great conversations we had had with the driver.

quack convention!!

2009-07-03T11:10:00.000-07:00

So my research is going pretty well, but in the meantime there is something much more exciting to update you on. We have two total quacks, who came here independently, staying at our hotel and testing their “therapies” on Malawians.

Jim Humble came about 2 weeks ago. He is an old creepy pale man, sort of a hunchback, white hair and a scratchy voice that comes out in bursts, maybe early Parkinson's? He is in Balaka because he is promoting what he calls MMS, miracle mineral solution. It is chlorine dioxide and lemon juice and water. If you take a few drops twice a day, you will be cured. He calls himself an “inventor” and has a “clinic” in Mexico (no medical training). His cure will take care of AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, tooth abcesses. He has been testing the drug in prisons in Lilongwe, and has now moved down to Balaka to sell it at an herbal clinic.

Once one of the professors overheard him on the phone in his room saying “If the wrong people got their hands on this information we could be in trouble. Just go and take photos of all the people and we will be in the clear. Everybody still alive?” Instructions: “Take 2 drops twice a day, it will dissolve heavy metals in the body, kill the parasites. Basically flooding the body with oxygen, and oxygen oxidizes. That is what omega 3s are all about. Basically I think it is like the Japanese have booths with pure oxygen.”

So not only do we have Jim Humble, who is staying at our hotel indefinitely, but there is also a totally unrelated quack who came to the hotel tonight. Brian Kocourek- he came here to do mission work. He's an evangelical pastor, American, living in Cincinatti. He has given 140 “zappers”, to people all over the country. It is this little thing with two copper rods attached to a 9 volt battery. He showed it to us, and you put one hand on each rod. According to him, there are different “frequencies” and 365 is the frequency for AIDS ("easy to remember because that's how many days are in a year." It also cures malaria, yellow fever, jaundice. All have different frequencies. He wants to democratize the “Electronic cure” 26 patients, all were cured. Cheap technology, it works, but FDA will never buy it because it is not a drug, and FDA are attached to drugs.

His sales pitch: In Bolivia, a little girl had an infection around her mouth. Whole mouth top and bottom gums were totally cancer sores. Seen 12 doctors, all kinds of drugs. He happened to be there preaching at the church. Said why don't you take my zapper, hold it on each side of your mouth, see if the current runs through, what happens when I get back. Went into the Amazon to do some mission work, came back and she was completely cured. Left her that and some neosporin. There was a nurse, he asked her administer it to her. He is not a doctor but this thing works. Instructions: cover handles with one layer of white paper towel. Wet the towel with water. 7 min on 20 minutes off. 7 minutes on, 20 minutes off. "We do what we can. The little children are what I care about.” Cures AIDS, parasites, malaria, yellow fever, jaundice. "

what it is made of: 9 volt battery, resisters, oscillator. Copper rods. One side has an LED. Kills the viruses through frequencies. Apparently one time he burned himself by falling asleep with it on his cheek, so since then he recommends the wet paper towel.

Both were doing testing in Mexico, because they weren't allowed to do trials in the US.
He has also mentioned a cure that involves cholorine dioxide and citric acid, can make it with lemon juice. We said, there is someone here who does that. He said, who? We said, “Jim Humble.” He said “Jim Humble is here? What!???” We told him what room he is staying in and he lept out of his seat and ran to check it out. Apparently at the same time as he has been marketing his zapper, he has also been distributing the MMS of Jim Humble! Jim Humble is a hero of his, they both have their “clinics” in Mexico! A quack convention! Hallelujah!

daily routine and thoughts about stigma

2009-06-20T02:30:00.000-07:00

Things are going well here. I have been busy doing my interviews and the internet has been really spotty, so I haven't been able to post anything, but here's a brief update.

I am really enjoying my daily routine. I walk to the research center every morning, about a 40 minute walk through town, stopping at the market on my way to get fruits and veggies and at the Superette, where a very nice man saves newspapers for me (they are hard to come by in this town). Then I work here for a few hours, mostly so far that has been perfecting my questionnaires, getting them translated into Chichewa and checking the translation, and reading some articles and things that people have thrown my way. Then I sometimes walk home or take a bike taxi home for lunch, and sometimes stay here and get a samosa or some chips and bananas as a snack. Then in the evening I have mostly been reading.

A funny thing happened last week- we went to the cobbler to have sandals made, and a friend of mine wanted to have some flip flops made with thin straps. So another friend had some thin flipflops that had a straw bottom that we brought in as an example of the type of straps we wanted. The cobbler asked us to leave them, so we did, and went to pick up the new pair of sandals, along with the older one, to find that he had painstakingly leathered over the straw flip flops! They actually look sort of cool, but definitely not what any of us expected.

Ann Swidler and Susan Watkins came yesterday, along with three new grad students and an anthropologist, Adam Ashforth. So we have doubled in size, which I'm sure will change how things feel at Catholic Women's. I'm really glad to have Ann and Susan around again- they have so many good ideas and are always willing to talk through ideas with grad students.

One interesting conversation I had recently was about stigma- the need for the concept of stigma to be reexamined. I think stigma does exist here, but not in the way that ngos speak of it. I think that in Malawi, stigma and compassion are deeply intertwined. Jenny told of a time she was riding a minibus, where everyone was chatting loudly and the bus was speeding around the potholes, and then a woman put a sick man (visibly dying of AIDS) on the bus. According to Jenny, the bus immediately became quiet and the driver drove much more slowly, as if he was carrying precious china. This is pretty similar to how I have heard people speak of AIDS, and how I have seen AIDS patients be treated. From my experience, stigma does exist, but it is not the type of heartless prejudice that would make people banish an AIDS patient. This stigma is more of a discomfort, a quiet fear, similar to what happens in America around terminally ill cancer patients. According to Erving Goffman, stigma is when people are unable to behave normally around you, roles must be shifted, behaviors no longer fit with established codes of conduct. AIDS is an ugly disease- it always kills and the misery it creates is visible on people's skin. So maybe “stigma” = “stigmata”, visible, repulsive mark. Anyway, an interesting thing to think about- whether stigma and compassion can be present at the same time.

Sunday in Liwonde

2009-06-08T00:46:00.000-07:00

Four days in, my life in Balaka is slowly becoming routine. We work six days a week, and take off Sundays. Yesterday I traveled with one of the other grad students, Amy, to Liwonde, a town about an hour away, to have lunch at an Indian restaurant. The food was great, and the restaurant is right on the Shire River, so there are hippos slowly floating by, and tons of bougainvillea, very relaxing. It makes me uncomfortable though, because the place smacks of colonialism- fountains and a veranda and the wait staff kneels to ask you what you want, and talks very softly. It is run by Indians and owned by Chinese, like many of the businesses here.

Sundays are really nice because everybody goes to church, so as we were walking down the road to catch the minibus, we heard singing all along the way. The singing is beautiful- lots of harmonies and very different style than our church singing. I think Malawians tend to have better pitch than Americans.

I chose an excellent week to come- last week we got both hot water at the hotel and wireless internet at the office. So life here is much more comfortable than it was a week ago. It's so nice to have hot showers, it feels really decadent. The only thing is that the water sort of sprays in a very wide circle, so you can only catch a little bit of the stream, and the rest of it sprays out around you. So while the pressure is pretty good, it takes a while to wash because not much water pours out on you at once.

Food situation is quite good. We cooked yesterday and made pasta with tomato sauce and string beans, sauteed eggplant, and hummus. And today I am going to learn how to make yogurt. And we have bread delivered twice a week from a bakery, which is great on the first day and pretty good after that, except that it needs to be toasted, because no matter how many bags we tie it in it always gets tiny little red ants in it.

In terms of research, I am still waiting on finding interviewers for my adolescent girls project. I have a meeting this afternoon, and will hopefully get some names of people who applied for Jenny's project but did not quite make the cut. They had 300 people apply for 20 spots, so there were many who were high scoring but couldn't be hired. For my teacher interviews, I am meeting with people from the schools this week, hopefully. I'm itching to get started but still have quite a bit of time, so if things start off slowly its ok.

first day

2009-06-05T07:57:00.000-07:00

I arrived in Malawi yesterday, after a relatively uneventful journey (the only excitement was that my debit card was frozen twice during my 10 hour layover in London, despite the fact that I called ahead and let them know I would be traveling out of the country, which led to two unpleasant pay phone calls with mastercard from Heathrow).

My plane landed at about 2:30, and I had planned on finding a hotel and getting a minibus the next morning to travel to Balaka, but to my surprise there was a man named Andalo holding a hilariously decorated sign that said “Hie Maggi from Balaka.” By hilariously decorated I mean with flowers and stars and squiggles. Andalo had booked me a ticket on a fancy bus that left at 5, so he took me to his house, where I met his wife and two daughters. Andalo was a funny character- he is a movie buff, and had a huge shelf of tapes and dvds, and seems to have built up his vocab from movies, which made it hard to understand him at times. He kept saying things were “just juicy lucy” (the fuel prices going down since last year) and “sugar in spice” (weather in Balaka) He also said that the living in Balaka was “a roller coaster” I'm not sure what that means- either that it is unpredictable or really exhileratingly fun...

The place we are staying is really nice- it even has roses in the front garden! And the food is pretty good- standard rice and chicken and bitter greens, but well cooked. I went to the market this morning and found both avocados and okra, so that made me happy. There are 3 other grad students here so far, and all seem nice and really have their shit together, which will be motivating for me to get mine together. One of them just arrived on Sunday and has already completed 6 interviews, and she had stomach flu for 2 days- tough to live up to.

While I don't think I'll be able to match Amy's pace, I think research wise things should be moving pretty quickly for me as well. I had a great meeting this morning with Jenny about my teacher interviews. We decided that I should focus on 2 or 3 schools, and interview teachers multiple times, to try to get them to tell me more personal or potentially sensitive details. She wants me to ask a lot of questions about the “no chibwenzi” policy, which makes it against the rules to have any sexual relationships. I find that policy really fascinating, since many of the students in secondary school are in their 20s- its hard to imagine even a middle school setting a no dating policy, but for it to extend so far into adolescence is totally unimaginable in the states. A detail that only other demographers or sociologists would find exciting- I discovered that Jenny (the woman who runs the larger survey) has compiled a household listing of the entire town of Balaka, so my interviews will be a random sample. My methods teacher from the fall would be very happy to hear that :)

In other news, things are a bit tense at the hostel, because one of the other grad students who arrived last week lost about $50, and went to the woman who is in charge of the place. She immediately fired all of the cleaners, many of whom have been good friends with the project staff for many months. Accusations go a very long way here, and people are guilty until proven innocent. It is hard to take them back or prevent them from leading to outcomes you don't intend. Jenny is trying to convince Emma, the woman who runs the hostel, to hire them back, but it does not look likely. Hopefully it will blow over soon.

Back to Malawi! Leaving day...

2009-06-02T15:30:00.000-07:00

After weeks of running errands almost constantly, I am at the SFO airport, waiting for my first of three planes totaling more than 36 hours, and expect to arrive on site in Balaka some time on Friday afternoon (today is Tuesday). I'm hoping to have more access to internet, so please check in every once in a while for updates on research, travel, and unexpected adventures that I encounter over the next few months! I may even be able to upload some photos this summer, although that may be wishful thinking...

Quick description of what I'll be doing: I'm working for a sociologist at ASU, Jenny Trinitapoli, who is conducitng a longitudinal study of young women's transitions to adulthood. She's based in Balaka, which is in the south, not too far from the lake. I'll be helping her to conduct interviews with teachers and administrators at the schools attended by the adolescents in th study. I will also be continuing my own research from last summer, interviewing young women about their aspirations for the future, including marriage, employment, and education. This summer I'm planning to talk to both studenst and otut of school youth, to see how they differ in terms of how much control they see themselves having over their lives. I'm looking forward to being able to conduct the teacher interviews myself, as they will be comfortable in English (for the schoolgirl interviews, I had to hire Chichewa speaking interviewers, so I would wait until they were transcribed and translated before finding out what people had said, making it harder to ask follow-up questions. I'm also trying to learn some Chichewa, pangono pangono (slowly slowly). Ndi kufuna phunzira. (I want to learn).

Differences between this summer and last summer: There will be fewer Americans there this summer than last summer, but there will still be quite a smattering of professors, grad students, husbands, babies, and one high school student, Sophie, who will apparently be my assistant for the last few weeks I'm there. I'll have to figure out what to do with her... The two professors who I worked closely with last year, Susan Watkins and Ann Swidler, will be there for 4 weeks as well. They give off an electric intellectual energy, and type all day long, so I'm looking forward to getting a lot done while they are there. Balaka is a larger town than Mchinji, where I was based last year. There is internet, and even a supermarket apparently! I'm looking forward to meeting up with friends from last year while I am there, and looking forward to making several new friends! Jenny, the woman I'm working for, has young girls (a 4 year old and a 1 year old), and she has been living in Balaka for 4 months. According to the emails she sent me, she has an herb garden, and has figured out how to make yogurt, ricotta cheese, and granola. I'm looking forward to helping with the cooking and eating something other than goat and nsima this summer!

That's all for now, but I'll hopefully write more in a few days, after the long and solitary journey...

I'm not going to cook it...

2008-08-13T01:47:00.000-07:00

But I'll order it from Zanzibar!

Ben and I arrived here in Zanzibar after 3 days in Mbeya, a bit more than planned but it was a lovely town to hang out in. We were exuberantly befriended by Philip, the town ambassador, who on two occasions bought us about 6 beers and wouldn't take no for an answer- as soon as we took a sip there would be another one waiting for us. He was very entertaining and incredibly generous, which has been the way things have gone every time we have been to a bar- people insist on buying us drinks even though they make a tenth of our grad school stipends. We also tried to hike Mbeya peak, one of the highest mountains in Tanzania, but didn't make it even to teh base of the climb- the guidbook said we could do it in 5 hours, and we took that to mean from where the minibus lets off, but after 3 hours of walking through the villages we were still quite far from the base of the mountain. But it was a great walk and we hitched a ride back with a nice family. And ben got to taste sugar cane, which is an essential part of travelling in Africa.

We tried to take the train to Dar but the station was closed when we arrived, and it was a holiday the next day. We went early in the morning on Friday, but there were no more tickets available for the Saturday train, and the next did not leave until Wednesday. So we decided to take the bus. It was a nice busride- I was worried it wouldn't have a toilet (it is a 12 hour ride, and we had had quite a few beers, against our will, the night before thanks to Philip) but it did, along with snacks of mango juice and cookies and reclining seats. And the best part was that we went through a game reserve and saw giraffes, elephants, zebras, monkeys, baboons, and two kinds of antelope. We got some great giraffe pictures. It was fun because the whole bus was really excited about hunting for animals, and would shout out the names of the animals in various languages and exuberantly point out the window.

We then took a 4 hour ferry to Zanzibar, which was quite rocky- I'm glad neither of us get seasick. While here, we have spent the past 2 days exploring the winding, narrow streets of Zanzibar and eating the best street food in the world, I'm convinced- fresh caught fish of various varieties on skewers that they will grill for you, for less than a dollar per skewer. My favorite is barracuda, but there is also marlin, tuna, catfish, red snapper, lobster, abalone, shark, and lots of huge scary looking octupuses. And sugar cane juice with lots of ginger and lime. Sooo delicious. Stone town also has really incredible architecture, old, partially decaying but really extravagant houses with intricately carved wooden doors, balconies, and other things, and streets that are too narrow for cars to pass through (vespas are the common mode of transport) and the people are a unique mix of Swahili, Arabic, Indian, and some Tanzanians from the mainland who have come to take advantage of the tourism market.

I was here 4 years ago when I was studying abroad in uganda, and since then it has become much more touristy. There are also a lot more obnoxious people trying to get us to buy their chatchkas, or give them a tip for escorting us places we would rather walk to on our own. Yesterday I sort of told one of them off and he followed us for a while talking about how I am a bad girl, a racist, and not a nice person. I think he was on drugs, but it was upsetting nonetheless.

Last night while eating our dinner on the beach, we met a really charming group of secondary school boys, who came up to us wanting to practice their english. One of them invited us to go to his home village to meet his family, another wants us to come to his English school tonight. We may do one of those options. They also really wanted to ask Ben his advice about various sexual issues- one of them who we think must have been gay was earnestly asking him "what to do with all the desire he had for someone who was living in his house and also had a lot of desires, and how could he get rid of so much desire, and also his semen?" another wanted to know what the girls care about in terms of flowers and courtship. It is a conservative Muslim society, and the boys and girls are forbidden to talk to each other most of the time, so they must have seen him as an opportunity to get answers to many of their questions.

Tomorrow, I think we will go to the beach, to a place that apparently has good snorkeling, although we can't find any deals for less than $40 per person, which seems ridiculous.

Hi from Tanzania!

2008-08-07T08:43:00.000-07:00

Ben arrived on Friday of last week, and I was invited to a wedding on Saturday, so he came along. It was the wedding of two members of the data entry team, and a bunch of others from the project went along as well. It was at a church in Lilongwe- we tried to take public transport and arrived at a different church, quite far from where we wanted to be, but fortunately the wedding started more than three hours late so we didn't miss anything. The ceremony was quite similar to American weddings, with the addition of the mini bride and groom, two 5 year olds dressed up in a wedding dress (complete with a veil) and a tuxedo who walked down the aisle together before the bride. This was in addition to the multiple flower girls and the ring bearer- maybe there are just more cute kids in Malawi so they added an extra role.

After the wedding, we were driven to a house of somebody in the wedding party and fed rice and chicken. Ben did a good job with his first Malawian meal- we sat on mats on the ground, ate with our fingers and were served enormous portions of rice, and he almost finished his. Then we went to the reception, which involved dancing up to the front of a room, near where the couple stood, and throwing money at them. We were warned, and had been to the bank to get a lot of small bills for the occasion. Luckily we were also warned to not throw them all at once, because it lasted for about 5 hours.

After the wedding, we headed to Nkhata Bay, on the lake, for some snorkeling and a lot of walking around town. We stayed right on the beach, the water was about 3 feet from our front door, in a thatched bungalow thing. It was very nice, and the people there were very friendly, if not a little bizarre. There were a lot of rastas, we met a man named Happy Coconut, and another as Chicken Pizza, and another as Justin Time. The food frequently took about 2 hours to come, and once they went to the store to buy the ingredients about an hour after we ordered. But luckily we were not in a hurry to do anything, although we did get pretty hungry.

We spent 2 nights there and then headed to Mzuzu, a town in the mountains of Malawi not far from the border. We stayed at a hostel that had a really awesome wood burning hot water heater, and saw lots of monkeys and baboons on the side of the road. One of htem tried to jump into our minibus. The minibus riding has been a lot of the fun- we met a lot of interesting people and had some great conversations. They are incredibly crowded and the legroom is hard to come by, but I really like riding them, as long as we don't go for too many hours.

I have so far been in two vehicles htat almost broke down- our minibus yesterday back from Nkhata Bay, and the truck I got a ride in up to Lilongwe to pick Ben up. In both cases we were able to slowly make our way to our destinations, although in the truck, smoke was pouring out of the gearshift and we were pretty afraid that the engine was busted, because it wouldn't turn on for a while. It turned out that it was leaking oil (at least I think that was the problem), and we were able to drive it the extra 30 km to Lilongwe as long as we pulled over every 2 minutes to let it cool down. Somebody who lived near where we pulled off the road came up to have a look, and turned it on, heard the coughing, saw the smoke, and said, "Oh, this car is perfect!"

Now, we are trying to figure out our next move- maybe going by train to Dar on Saturday, maybe taking a bus to a park tomorrow where there are lost of monkeys. We shall see. Safaris are proving to be quite difficult to plan and incredibly expensive, so it seems doubtful that we will do that, although it would be nice.

pictures of the lake trip

2008-07-28T06:44:00.000-07:00

Braai!

Fun at the lake!

Mbuzi Mbuzi.

2008-07-28T06:38:00.001-07:00

So I am still here in Liwonde, and still making use of this sweet deal I have found with the internet and the hippos at the hotel down the road. Right now I am watching a man fishing in the river about 100 feet from where I am, using what is unmistakably a bednet to catch his fish. Not sure the folks who provided him with that net would be thrilled, but it’s industrious, at least.

Things are going pretty well here, I am trying to wrap everything up. I have done 12 interviews so far, and the only problem really is that I am sort of scrambling to find a translator/transcriber. Both of my interviews are leaving on Thursday, so I will need to hire other people, and the project is already employing most of the educated young people in the area who wouldn’t mind the horribly tedious job of transcribing from a digital recorder and have the English skills to do it. So we will see. But the interviews seem to be going well. My Chichewa is now such that I can usually tell what topic they are discussing, but not any of the content of the interviews.

Yesterday was Sunday, which is sometimes a day off for the team. Yesterday was one of those times, since we finished the training and they started the fieldwork today. So we went to Cape MacClear for the day, on the shores of Lake Malawi. It was really fun, we had the whole crew there, the field supervisors and the data entry people and the VCT counselors. And the lake was beautiful, and it was fun to splash around with them. And to watch them show off what really is a national treasure- Malawians are incredibly proud of how beautiful the lake is. And it is really gorgeous.

We were supposed to leave at 7:30 but didn’t end up leaving until after 9 because there was a problem with one of the minibuses we were supposed to take- one of the seats had to be welded back on. We also had to visit the goat tree, which is right next door to where I am staying, to buy a goat to take with us to have a braai. We borrowed the barbecue stand from our friends who own the bar and restaurant that I have already told you about.

Goat is “mbuzi” in Chichewa, and for the past week and a half all of the field supervisors have been teasing me about how I need to try “mbuzi mbuzi”, which is the way they say goat testicles. (By the way, they are shy about saying any sexual words here, and have very funny slang for most of the words- for example, to have sex is “yendayenda” which means “move move”. When I asked what mbuzi mbuzi means they wouldn’t even say the word testicle, they spelled it out for me in English.) So, when they got the goat, they made sure that the mbuzi mbuzi were included. It was pretty disgusting to look at, the hair was still on them and everything. But I tried a very small bite and it was actually pretty good, I have to admit. Tasted kind of like liver. And everyone was very excited that we were willing to taste it.

The trip unfortunately took more than 3 hours both ways because they are repaving the highway, so they kept diverting us to the side of the road, but it kept switching which side we were supposed to be driving on. The way home was sort of scary- there was no signage, and it was really dark, so several times we were driving a while only to realize that the road ended in a ditch and the real path was on the other side of the road. The drivers here are fearless, and fond of driving up the sides of ditches, so that the wheels on one side are much higher than the wheels on the other. Sort of unnerving for us, but they are pretty experienced with shitty roads, so I trust them for the most part.

One thing that I will not miss about Malawi is that they are incredibly obsessed with playing music at top volume- the vans all have crazy souped up speaker systems and they blast hip hop, mostly reggae, and usually the same 3 songs over and over, because tapes only have three songs on them. I now know almost all the words to “that’s just the way it is.” Which I’m sure will come in handy some day.

Liwonde

2008-07-22T05:57:00.000-07:00

The place I am staying now is right near a national park and by a main road that goes between the two big cities in Malawi, Blantyre and Lilongwe, so although there isn't much going on here in Liwonde, there are some really nice hotels, including one with free wifi and good Indian food. So I should be much more well-connected for the next week or so, until I leave to meet up with Ben and go travelling. There is also a very nice bar across the street and down a bit from where we are staying, with outdoor tables and a covered patio with pool tables. The family that owns it are all women, three generations (the men are either dead or divorced) and they are really nice. We have been eating dinner at their restaurant every night so far.

We also went to the national park last week, because a girl we worked with earlier this summer is now working part time for a nonprofit that is based at the park, so she stays at the lodge for free and eats her meals there. We spent an evening with her and ate delicious food (actually not that delicious, just more flavorful than I am used to here) and went on a quick 20 minute safari for free. We saw hippos and crocodiles and baboons and a big group of elephants, including two who were mating.

I have been helping out more with the survey team this week. They are training their interviewers, so we helped with recruitment and interviewing. There were a ton of people who applied for the job, as it pays pretty well and they like to hire local interviewers so there were 70 jobs suddenly available in this area. Many of them were extremely qualified, with fat envelopes with credentials and certificates and letters of reference. They had to do a written exam on the first day, that tested them on their command of English, their understanding of basic research concepts and some pretty tricky questions such as “what is a household?” (correct answer: “a group of people, not necessarily related, living together but not necessarily in the house, it could be in the same compound, who eat from the same pot and have one head of the household who makes all of the decisions. “ I definitely would have gotten some points subtracted for that one.) On the second day, we did oral interviews with them, and asked them questions like, “what is the first thing you would do when you arrive at the house of a respondent?” and, “what are three qualities of a good interviewer?” That one yielded some very funny responses, like one guy who said that a good interviewer is one who brings a pen- that was the only one he could come up with. Another said they should not be drunk.

I have really been enjoying spending more time with Malawians this week- we were starting to feel pretty abandoned in Mchinji since most of the survey team and data team had already moved on to Rumphi, and there was no space for us there. Now we are all together again, and there are some really wonderful people who I have gotten to know. Most of them are incredibly smart and very industrious, and have a lot of ideas for my project and the survey in general. It is sad to think that most of them will be unemployed once we leave- even a university degree doesn’t get you too far these days unless you have a lot of either luck or connections.

I have also been setting up my own project, I hired an interviewer this morning and I am speaking with another one tomorrow, and I am going to meet the headmaster tomorrow morning. I am hoping to do another round of 20 interviews, although I only have about 11 days left so time is a bit tight. But once I get started it shouldn’t take too long.

And Ben comes on August 1st! I am getting very excited for his arrival. We are working out our travel plans pangono pangono (Chichewa for little by little).

pictures

2008-07-20T06:15:00.001-07:00

Schoolgirls walking down the road.

church this morning- the music was great but the sermon was in Chichewa and it lasted three hours

house in the village we lived near in Mchinji. I took this on the way to the hike we did.

cute little girl who lived near me in Mchinji.

market day in Ntcheu, about a half hour from Liwonde where I am staying now. Notice all of the sellers crowded around the bus.

Beach trip

2008-07-20T04:51:00.000-07:00

This past weekend I went to Senga Bay, on the shores of Lake Malawi about 2 hours away from the capital city of Lilongwe. We left on Friday, and took a project minibus because we thought it would save us time compared with taking public transport, although there is a gas shortage across Malawi and we ended up spending more than 2 hours in Lilongwe trying to find diesel for the bus. We have been buying off the black market for weeks in Mchinji, but we figured there would be some in the big city. Unfortunately we were wrong- every gas station that we drove up to had traffic cones in front of the pumps to show that they were empty, and they all directed us to gas stations across town that were also empty. There were lines of trucks along the road, waiting for gas, the drivers fast asleep and looking like they had been there for many hours if not days. We were worried that we wouldn’t be able to fill up and would have to change our vacation plans to Salima. Luckily we were able to find a place outside of the city that had a huge truck parked with barrels of diesel. It was a pretty awesome scene- the whole parking lot was just crammed with cars and trucks, and everyone was running back and forth with jugs and bottles, filling up a gallon at a time. A few hours later, we were off.

We got to the place we were staying at about 2:30, and put our stuff into our rooms and ran to the beach. I stayed in an old camper trailer from the 60’s, which was really adorable but sort of moist and rotten. Luckily, the bed was lofted so it was nice and dry. The beach was awesome- it was pretty windy the whole time and there were huge waves, and you couldn’t see the other side at all. It really seemed like an ocean- there was a sandy beach and huge fishing boats and the sound of waves crashing. The water was warm and really clear, and the swimming was awesome. We took a boat ride to a tiny island and there were huge lizards sunning themselves, about 4 feet long. They looked like dragons. The food was also really good- we had fresh caught fish every day. And there was a scrabble set. It was a great vacation.

Then yesterday we went to Lilongwe and walked around doing errands and my friend got her phone stolen and there were lots of people shouting at us and grabbing us and I was reminded of how glad I am that I am not staying in a city this time. African cities are difficult to find affection for. Then on the way home an old man gave us each a piece of raw cassava to try, which was the most disgusting thing I have ever eaten. It definitely needs to be cooked.

And then we went back to Mchinji, and I thought we were heading up to Rumphi (in the north) the next day but it turns out that three motels were closed by the government last week for being below standard, so now there is no lodging in Rumphi and we were sort of stuck. I had already finished all of my research in Mchinji and was pretty frustrated to be hanging out in the hotel, so my friend Yael and I left the next day for Liwonde, where we are now.

More to come.

Perceptions about AIDS

2008-07-09T00:05:00.000-07:00

Not much new has happened here- I have been working hard on my project: I have now done 20 interviews and a survey with 30 other respondents, and the PI just gave me some money to do more in the next field site, either Rumphi or Balaka, depending on where we end up going next week. The transcripts from the interviews so far are pretty interesting- it is too early to really draw any conclusions but it seems there is some good information there. I have also been doing a lot of coding, and wanted to share one thing that I have been thinking a lot about that has come up in the journals.

As I read the journals, I feel like I have learned a whole ton about the AIDS epidemic as it is experienced by rural Malawians, many things that I wouldn’t have expected. Most of these come nowhere close to indicating policy changes- things that I think could be, or could have been, done differently to change the shape of the epidemic. Most of the voices in the journals, and in the survey, seem to show that most Malawians have known about what causes AIDS since the survey started in 1998, and likewise they have known how to prevent it. Everyone can rattle off the ABCs by now (that’s abstinence, be faithful, or use a condom), and most younger than 25 have been shown the condom on a banana trick several times. So it is not an information gap in that sense, and it seems that there hasn’t been one for a long time.

What does seem to be true, however, is the fact that Malawians have been told so often, and in so many ways, that the only way to avoid AIDS is to avoid unprotected sex, that they begin to see AIDS as deterministic- if one sleeps with someone who has AIDS even once, they are automatically infected. The fact that in reality the probability of transmission during a single act is very low- in rural Uganda the probability of contracting the virus from a single act with an infected partner was only 0.0011, or about 1 in 1,000. Rural Uganda and rural Malawi are not too different, although Malawi is more food insecure so this might be a bit higher for Malawi, but the point is that the probability based on a single act is really tiny: it is repeated exposure that is the real problem on a population level.

This deterministic attitude leads to two problems: first, people who have had risky sexual interactions in the past, such as sleeping with prostitutes or being in a relationship with someone who slept around, they automatically assume they already have the disease. This leads to a fatalistic attitude that “everyone will die soon of AIDS, except for the virgins and the very old.” And in a social world where everyone is perceived to already be infected, it doesn’t make much sense to use protection unless two people are sleeping together who have had very different levels of sexual experience. If two people are both already thought to be infected, what is the point of using a condom?

Even worse, if someone is in a relationship with someone who has been tested and is HIV positive, the fact that they think that the probability of infection is 100% leads them to decide against avoiding sex with that person or beginning to using condoms. To them, it makes sense- it would be like using birth control after menopause. But the problem is that this makes what is in reality the most risky thing one can do- repetitively exposing oneself to the virus- seem perfectly rational, if they have already strayed from the straight path that is beaten into their heads by all of the sex-ed NGOs, then they see no point in protecting themselves.

A journal that I read involved a man bringing his marital dispute to the village headman, asking for a divorce on the grounds that his wife slept with a man he believed to be infected. The response of the villagers was that the man “was stupid to divorce his wife at that time because if he feared AIDS, the he already has it, so there was no point of divorcing the wife while you’re already infected.” Here is another example, from another journal: “And then I asked my in-law, ‘What do people do after noticing that his/her partner seems to have AIDS? He said, ‘Some couples come to an end and for others the marriage continues.’ And I asked, ‘Do they use condoms then?’ He said ‘I don’t think they use because it will just be a waste of time since both of them have contracted the disease.”

In the survey in 1998, they tested almost the entire sample of married couples for HIV, and there were more serodiscordant couples, or couples in which one tested positive and one negative, than there were couples who both tested positive. So this attitude is really quite dangerous.

The idea of telling people how unlikely it is that they would become infected from one sexual act is pretty controversial- especially in a place with such high prevalence it seems to go against the obvious need to minimize risky behaviors and basically scare people out of having sex. However, I’m pretty convinced that they need this piece of information to make rational decisions about how to protect themselves.

hike, alcohol, etc

2008-07-03T03:11:00.001-07:00

Sunday afternoon we hiked up Mount Kayesa, the nearest mountain to where we are staying. We crossed through the village and accumulated a large gang of tiny kids following us as we went. They love having their pictures taken with our cameras since we can show it to them on the screen. We were warned that there are spirits on the mountain and sometimes they like you and sometimes they don’t- I guess they liked us because we made it down unscathed. My friend Shem showed me some medicinal plants- one that you rub on your skin to stop the itch- I tried it on a bite and it was really rough and had course little hairs on it- maybe it is the texture that makes people like to scratch their itches with it, rather than actual medicinal properties. The other was a tree that had these hairy seed pods, apparently if you burn them, the ashes heal ringworm.

On the way back, passing through the village again I was struck by how much of a problem alcoholism seems to be in rural Malawi- we passed several groups of men, and some women as well, who were just wasted. One old woman staggered up to us and tried to talk to us but even the Malawians among us couldn’t understand what she was saying. The brew that they drink is called “kill me quickly” in Chichewa. From the diaries it seems that alcoholism and sexuality are very closely related- all women who sleep with men outside of marriage are called “bargirls”, all stories involving sex or even starting a relationship involve the men getting drunk first, to work up the courage. Also, when people are unfaithful it is often tied to drinking. The gender dynamics of drinking are hard to understand- drinking in bars is definitely a male-only activity but drinking at home seems ok for women, and women are the ones who brew the local alcohol and sell it in the villages.

Another aspect of local culture that is hard for outsiders to understand is transactional sex. Almost all sexual relationships here involve some exchange of resources- a girl would think it was really strange to hear that we just sleep with men and get nothing in exchange. But in a place where hunger is pervasive and the line between normal life and abject poverty is somewhat shaky, its hard to draw the line between transactions that represent love and those that are purchasing sex. Prostitutes are different than bargirls and bargirls are different from chibwenzis, but all involve gifst or money… its hard to figure out the moral landscape here.
My project is going pretty well- I have done 12 interviews so far. I’ll write more about that later, next week when we move to Balaka.

the boma

2008-06-27T03:23:00.000-07:00

I have started walking into the boma, the local town, every day. It is about an hour’s walk by the main road, which is dusty and has almost no shoulder, so you have to be on the lookout for the occasional car or truck that drives too fast. The main road is really lively, though- there are always tons of people walking along it or just standing there chewing sugar cane, and almost every compound sells something- usually a bowl of beans or tomatoes or bananas on a chair or small table. It looks like they are totally unattended, and you probably could steal it if you were quick enough, but if you stand there for a few seconds a woman always appears from one of the huts to take your money. The other option is a trail behind our hotel that goes along the railroad tracks. The walk is a lot longer this way- probably about 90 minutes, maybe a little longer even, but it is a beautiful walk- you go through fields and past houses that are nestled by steep hills that have acacia trees growing on them, and there are lots of wild flowers and butterflies. It is also a bit quieter, so you don’t have to greet people every 10 seconds. I like this route better, but it takes the better part of the morning so I have only done it twice.

The boma itself is a short strip of small shops that are built along the main road (the only paved road around here, the one that goes into Lilongwe, the capital city). The shops mostly sell wholesale agricultural products, bicycle parts, and snacks. Then if you take a right at the petrol station, you get to the market, which is a confusing maze of small stalls. It is divided into sections, but it is difficult to figure out the logic- for example, the avocados are not with the rest of the vegetables but are instead are past where you buy grilled goat. (Avocados, by the way, are about the size of my head here- the first time I saw one I thought it was a melon.) We have been cooking dinner the past few days, and it is fun to walk around picking out veggies to make into a pasta sauce or figuring out how many fish a person would want to eat after they have been gutted. After 3 weeks of rice and chicken every day, it is also nice to be able to control what I eat. We’ll see how long it lasts, though, as the rest of the group doesn’t seem quite so keen and I am not really up for being the chef.

There are also several tailors, and we have been giving them lots of business- I had a bag made last week and just dropped off some other stuff today. Next week we are going to try designing outfits- my roommate, who is from Botswana, seems to know how one would go about this, so I think I’ll follow her lead. I’m holding out for a tailor who writes down measurements, though. They all measure various body parts with a tape measure, but don’t seem to do anything with the numbers, which has led to some horribly ill-fitting skirts for some members of the group.

funny stories

2008-06-25T02:37:00.000-07:00

Things are going well here- I have my first round of interviews this afternoon! We have had som issues with our boss but she is leaving so hopefully it will be better. No need to say more- who wants to read about a mean boss on a travel blog? So I'll tell some funny stories.
The media here is really quite hilarious. I read a story in the paper today about a promotion of the female condom at a local high school. The reporter described how a woman presented her story of how the female condom had “saved her life on December 7, 2007.” This was quite intriguing, so I read on…
She told of how she had been widowed 8 years ago, and lived alone, and a group of burglars came and took all of her possessions at night while she was sleeping, and after they were done robbing her, they came into her room to rape her. But fortunately, she just happened to be wearing a female condom, and they pulled off her pants and decided she looked so deformed (the article actually used the word deformed, I swear) that they ran away.
I’m pretty sure that none of those kids will ever even think of using a female condom!

Also, I have noticed that all of the toilet seats are cracked and I asked my Malawian friends about it and they said because a lot of people who are used to pit latrines try to stand up on the seat to use it. Isn’t that funny?

Balaka, more project stuff

2008-06-18T05:55:00.000-07:00

We had an airport pickup today, a girl came in from the University of Montreal, so I took the opportunity to jump on a minibus and check my email. Turns out there is no internet in the region we are staying, so it is quite difficult to maintain any kind of regular contact.

Things are going well- the diaries are still fun to read and I am getting faster at them, and the two PIs on the project, Susan Watkinks and Ann Swidler, came in last week, and ever since they came there is a lot of stimulating intellectual energy in the air- they are pretty much always talking about potential project ideas and I have learned a lot from watching how they interact with Malawians- they manage to have really interesting conversations with people they meet without the inevitable request for money or some type of financial assistance. The food has also gotten a lot better since they arrived- before it was just rice and chicken and greens every day, but now we are getting cole slaw, salads, cake, and even pizza yesterday! Life is looking up.

Over the weekend we went to the south, to Balaka to meet the diarists. It was nice to get away and see another part of the country- the drive to Balaka is breathtakingly beautiful, it is really hilly and bright green and red, and the weather was perfect. I got lots of good pictures, but unfortunately have no way to get them onto this computer since it just has a floppy disk drive- really old school! We were also able to go to the market in Balaka, which has a ton of beautiful chitenjis (fabrics) and I bought some nice ones, plus an awsome handpainted silk scarf with a coca cola bottle on it. Meeting the diarists was also nice, so that we can put a face to the name, although they really answered our questions as they thought we would want them to, sometimes directly contradicting what they wrote in the diaries. Like for example we tried to ask them about how the status of working for the project affects how people in the village treat them, and tehy insisted that nobody knows about the project, not even their families, but in the diaries they write about conversations about the diaries that they have with their wives and children. So we didn't get too much new information but it was still nice to meet them.

One thing that I have been thinking about recently is the status of women here. In a lot of ways, women are treated pretty badly- some cultures have brideprices, the girls are always the last ones to be picked to go to secondary school, and they aren't allowed to make any decisions about spending money, etc... as one would expect for a rural African country, I guess. But I have been quite surprised by how often the diaries have sections of women showing agency- divorcing their husbands for being unfaithful, insisting that their husbands stop spending money on alcohol, telling their parents that they will marry the one they love even if their father says no, etc. One of the diarists told us the story of how she divorced her husband, and insisted that he leave the village. She said repeatedly that her life is much better since the divorce, and she does not want to get married again. I think it is partly because in the south it is a matrilocal society, so when marriages split up the women are already in the communities they grew up in, so they have the support of their family.

My education and marriage project is shaping up also- Ann Swidler, who teaches at Berkeley, is encouraging me to try to do some interviews while I am here of secondary school girls, so I have put together a questionnaire and am in the process of trying to find an interviewer. We will see how it goes- it might be complicated to put it together but I would be psyched if it works out.

Well, that's all for now- hope everyone is doing well!

pictures!

2008-06-08T10:37:00.000-07:00

the water tap... apparently Malawi has some of the cleanest water in sub saharan Africa- don't worry though I am still not drinking it. the women is wearing a chitenji, which they wear over their skirts all the time - it is considered rude not to wear one when you are in the villages, so I will need to get used to tying them.

Sunday is apparently laundry day- almost everyone was doing laundry this morning. the birds there are guinea fowl, which are wild in Botswana but here are tamed and kept like chickens.

bicycles in front of the telephone store outside of my village. They are the main form of transportation for people- farmers sometimes ride oxen carts, but they can carry a surprising amount of things on their bikes... like 6 goats, or huge bales of hay. Also many of them are used as taxis.

here is the stand where we get water and hot sauce and fruits... the Malawian hot sauce is really delicious and tastes of garlic, and I have been putting it on everything.

this is a picture of the market, at about 7:00 on a Sunday morning. There really isn't a time when there is no activity here, people are noisy until 2 or 3 at night and then the town wakes up at 4:30- I have learned to sleep through noise. the market is quite fun to walk around, though, and yesterday we bought chitenjis, which are the pieces of cloth that women fold around their legs over their skirts. mine has teacups on it.

hello

2008-06-08T09:34:00.000-07:00

hi everyone!
so I am at my friend's house in the capital city, lilongwe, and I am just praying that the power stays on long enough for me to write something here. I have been here for four days so far, and much has happened!

I am staying at a hotel in the middle of the town we are in now, Mchinji, which is on the border with Zambia. It is incredibly dusty, and has one paved road running through it and a boma, or marketplace, that is off the road and is a confused jumble of stalls selling everything from pig entrails to random Chinese electronics (most of which i am told do not work). the hotel is fine, it is a bit loud because there is a bar next door where people stay until all hours of the morning. There is hot water but only when the power is on long enough, and the shower is directly over the toilet, which is a bit awkward.

i am sharing a room with a girl from Botswana who is also studying demography, and it has been really interesting to hear her comparisons between Malawi and Botswana... Botswana is a very rich country in comparison, and the infastructure is much better, but they have a much more severe AIDS problem. She also notes that the culture here is very different... Malawians are very meek, and will always say yes to any request even if the answer is no, which makes for some frustrating mealtime interactions, especially for the vegetarians who are told that of course they have eggs but then have to wait for 2 hours for someone to go into town to pick up eggs.

Malawi is much poorer than Uganda, and this is very evident both in daily experiences and in reading hte diaries. Almost every diary I have read makes reference to the hunger season, which is from December to February, when almost noone has any food in their stores, because the harvest from the previous year is eaten up and there is nothing new to eat. Most people are able to find piece work that will buy them one meal per day in December and January but in February there is no work to be done even on the rich farms, and most people boil inedible roots to fill their stomachs... hunger is very pervasive here, nobody seems to be going hungry now but you can feel that it is a constant concern, and we are very aware of this and try to always finish everything on our plates even if it doesn't taste very good.

Another interesting thing that seems to be quite evident is witchcraft... Everyone is always talking about witches, and there are signs for various witch doctors all over the place. Today Kim, our sort of boss, made it very clear that she does not want us walking around the villages after dark, and when we asked why, she said, with a completely straight face, that witch doctors will take white people's genitals to use in ceremonies. that made me stay inside after dark!

We started working the day after I came, and coding the diaries is a lot of fun, but quite hard. I spent all day coding a diary today about women killing babies and dumping them in pit latrines, and a husband coming after his wife with a panga (machete), and a witch burning a woman's house down because she became too rich... quite soap operas they are! and it is really a window into the culture... they talk a lot about prostitutes, and how all women who have AIDS or talk with men are prostitutes. One diary talked about how women who get ARVs are considered prostitutes, so they don't want to go to get medicine even if they find out they have AIDS.

the english that they use is quite funny, they switch their shes and hes all the time and use words like 'movious' to describe someone who gets around sexually, and the way that they describe sex is sweet, so they talk about sex being sweet all the time... we haven't really figured out what that one means yet.

The thing that I think I will end up studying over the next year is the effect of education on women's marital prospects.. there is much discussion of how when women become educated nobody wants to marry them, because the men have to be able to provide for their women. So I would like to look at how that affects whether women decide to go to school, starting with the diaries and then hopefully coming back next summer or some time to do some interviews. I also found out that there is a man at Berkeley who speaks Chichewa, which is exciting! It seems like a pretty simple language to learn, so hopefully I can pick some up before coming back, if I do end up wanting to come back next year.

Okay, well that is enough for now- I am going to try to load pictures but we will see how they turn out.

a little more about the project

2008-06-02T20:41:00.000-07:00

I wanted to give a little more information about the project I will be working on. I don't know what my tasks specifically will be yet but I can provide some background info about the project.

About 40% of my time (at least that is what they said) will be spent working on the larger survey:
The Malawi Diffusion and Ideational Change Project started 10 years ago and has been looking at the roles of social networks in determining contraceptive behavior and fertility desires, as well as how social networks determine the diffusion of knowledge about AIDS. By social networks, they basically mean who talks to who and in what context. The project asks everyone in the sample who they interact with on a regular basis and also everyone who they have had sex with. Also, they interview all of the wives of the men in the sample, which allows them to study how men and women describe relationships differently. They also interview their parents, so the sample size at this point is pretty large- about 7000 people (I think...)
If you are curious to know more about the overall project, here is the website:
http://www.malawi.pop.upenn.edu/Level%203/Malawi/level3_malawi_main.html

60% of my time will be spent working on a smaller project called the Conversational Journals Project, which asks a group of adults from each of the three villages to write down every conversation that they either hear or participate in that has to do with sex or AIDS. The journals have been collected for several years now, and there are over 700 of them, averaging 8 pages each. Here is the website of the journals project- if you are really super interested in demography, you can even look at some of the journals!
http://www.malawi.pop.upenn.edu/Level%203/Malawi/level3_malawi_qualjournals.htm

Okay, time to sleep- leaving early in the morning!!

leaving tomorrow!

2008-06-02T07:46:00.000-07:00

I am leaving tomorrow morning at 10:30 to go to Malawi for the summer. I will be working for June and July on the MDICP, a demographic study that has been going on for about 10 years. I'm not totally clear as to what this means on a day to day basis, I guess I will find out!

The study is based in three villages, one in the south, one in the middle part, and one in the north. I'll start out in the middle one, called Mchinji. Malawi is a long skinny country with a huge lake running all the way along its eastern coast. I will be staying in motels with other people in the study, and they will be serving us meals at those places.

Well that is about all I feel like writing before the fact... now back to packing and laundry!