Second week in Mbour

Last weekend I sought some respite and made the short trip to Saly for a couple of days. It was nice to get out of my dusty house, and to have electricity throughout the day, thanks to the hotel’s generator. It was also nice to have some time alone, something I take for granted as an American. You never realize how precious your time alone is until it is usurped from you for days on end! The hotel was dead as can be—there were about 5 other people staying there, and most of them were old French people. Needless to say, I didn’t make many friends, but it was nice to read my book and chill by the sea. I also ate pasta a couple of times, which was a welcome change from fish and rice…not that fish and rice aren’t tasty as well, but variety is key. I also had some cocktails! Alcohol had become a distant memory.

These birds at the hotel were very assertive and invasive, and wanted to eat my peanuts. They freaked me the hell out, to be quite frank. (I have a modest phobia of birds).





On Monday our faculty supervisor, Madame Dial, came from Dakar. She has been an ENORMOUS help, and is an invaluable guide for us methodologically. We refined our survey on Monday, paring it down, and changing the wording so it would give us the most effective feedback from the youth surveyed. Since Mme Dial arrived, our days became much longer. We’ve been working 10 hour days, with about an hour lunch break. This has largely contributed to our productivity, but it’s also exhausting given the heat, and the dust, and the repetitive and transitory nature of surveying in the field.

On Tuesday, after we felt our survey was ready for a second round of testing (Oulèye and I had done some pretesting last week), we entered the questions in Sphinx, a program that facilitates survey implementation and data analysis. It was interesting trying to learn this software as I went along—it is of course in French, and I’m not exactly an expert at French UI terminology, so navigating was a little rocky at first, but we finally got the survey the way we wanted it. Since we have no printer at the house, we had to export the survey to a file format that would be supported in an internet café in order to print. Unfortunately, Sphinx does not have the handy feature of directly exporting the survey format to a Word or PDF file. We were able to save it as an XPS file. From there, we had to copy it into Microsoft OneNote, a program I am completely unfamiliar with, but which seems to be a lame guise by Microsoft to propagate file formats unsupported by anyone but PC users, thereby aggrandizing their hegemony to an ever greater extent… Anyway from OneNote, we could then copy and paste into Word. This whole process, of course, was not intuitive, and was only accomplished after a brief bit of freaking out (mostly on my part) and worrying that all the work we had done to enter the questions in Sphinx would be for naught. We finally saved the Word version of our survey to a pen drive (un clé USB) and went on the hunt for a locale where we could print and photocopy the survey.

Mbacke suggested a place we could go to that would take care of both of those needs. It was potentially the most run down building I’ve been in since my arrival in Senegal. I am not being facetious when I say there was a phone booth in there that appeared to have been constructed in the early 1950s. There were salamanders crawling all around, and the paint was chipping off left and right, the place was covered in filth, flies everywhere, and there was no lighting, save the dim glow of the stone-age computers sitting on a rickety table. The personnel there were at first averse to connecting Oulèye’s clé USB to the computer, since they had to pull the whole setup out to find the neglected USB port. After some negotiating, they agreed to do so. Unfortunately, the computer did not recognize her clé. We moved to the other computer, only to find that it would not open the folder in which our document was to be found. After some finagling, we convinced the man working there to allow us to take the internet cable and hook our laptop up directly so as to email the file to ourselves, and then print from their computer there. No dice. We could not get an internet connection to the laptop. At one point, a salamander crawled across Oulèye’s foot and she ran screaming from the cavelike building, practically knocking me over as she fled, and inciting Mme Dial to run screaming after her. I sat there, nonplussed by the salamander frenzy, on an overturned, rusty can of paint, sweating from the computers’ radiant heat, stressed as hell that after over 2 hours of our best efforts, we could not get this forsaken survey printed. I finally convinced Mme Dial and Oulèye we needed to find a functional internet café if we were going to get anywhere with all this.

We walked into the street, where I was swarmed by no fewer than 5 men seeking some sort of alms for a Muslim religious organization… I wish I knew which group they belong to. Maybe someone can tip me off? They’re the guys that walk around with the pictures of who I assume (maybe wrongly, ignorantly?) to be the Cheikh from Touba around their necks and little yellow bowls for their collection. We finally made it to an internet café, and of course, right after we stepped inside, the power went out for its requisite second time of the day. This place had a generator, however, so we were in luck. We were able to open our file there, and get a printed copy, but not without going through three different printers, because they were so low on toner. We finally got to the photocopying stage, and made 30 copies of the survey. At this point we were famished. We went home and had a (typically) leisurely lunch. By the time we left the house, it was 6:00 pm and we hadn’t administered a single survey. We walked down the street from our house to a woodshop atelier, where we found a few teenage apprentices wrapping up their work for the day. We got two interviews out of the encounter, though one kid was embarrassed and ducked out about half way through the survey. I don’t think we’ll use the data from those two kids, but they were valuable for re-testing our questions.

The next day I made the necessary changes to the survey after having done those tests and we generated our new survey and went back to the internet café to print out copies of the updated survey. We also made copies of our informed consent, which was so graciously translated by my very own, McElroy Translation in Austin. I cannot emphasize enough how many grueling hours of translation work this saved me! And I’m sure the end product is infinitely better than anything I would have drafted. Oulèye agreed we would use the form for each encounter, and so far it has been going well; we are assigning participants a number, and only asking for their initials as an indication that they have been told their rights as participants in the study.

We were ambitious and productive and were able to survey 6 people that day. Each survey takes about 30 minutes, but the duration varies depending on the youth’s ability to engage with us. We thought we would try to get some female participants since at this point we had only spoken to young men. I had seen a street with a few tailors on one of the main roads, so we had a taxi drop us off there. We went by the first couturier and met the chef there, Sophie. She told us her young apprentices were working, but if we came back at 5:00 we could interview some of them. We walked on and found a hair salon down the street, where there were about 5 girls hanging out on the porch. They all met our sample requirements, and they were all willing and able to do the survey. These were, in my opinion, some of our best surveys yet, since the sample was procured completely randomly, and they weren’t affiliated with the CCA in any way, and they were engaged with the study. After the hair salon, we walked back to the tailor and surveyed a few more girls. Our sample is so far fairly diverse—we’ve had a mix of socio-economic backgrounds, neighborhoods, marital statuses, etc. (though we haven’t had any non-Muslims or youth with children yet.) We decided to try to find some boys after that, and surveyed two more young men on the street. All in all, Wednesday was the most productive, satisfying day I’ve had since I got to Senegal.

Today we had scheduled two focus groups: one was with a group of young male artists, and another with a group of female couture apprentices. We met with the boys first at the CCA. I got the impression they had been coaxed to talk to us, and they were hesitant to say anything negative. They were, however, very informed as far as STIs, HIV/AIDS, unintended pregnancy, contraception, etc. are concerned. But I have my doubts as to whether this type of sampling—that is, using contacts through the CCA, will compromise the integrity of our data. I think I much prefer to go out and find kids in the community as we happen upon them. All the same, we are using a snowball sample, and we pretty much take what we can get with regard to participants, as long as they meet our target population requirements. In the afternoon, we went to the market to meet the girls in their sewing workshop. This group had a very low awareness/knowledge level of STIs, contraception, etc. We must be careful not to influence their answers at all during the survey, but I feel compelled to see if we can dispel some of the seriously misinformed notions about STDs after the survey is done… I want to talk to Oulèye about this before we do our next focus group. After the second group, we did one more semi-structured interview and called it a day.

Maktar of UNFPA in Dakar informed me I will be going back to Dakar before I go to Tamba this weekend. He suggested I stay at my binome’s house on Saturday night. I feel/felt very uncomfortable asking her if I could do this, and what’s more, I know her house is crammed with children and grandchildren, and I’m not even sure I would have a place to sleep. Oulèye and I are to arrange our own transport to Dakar (I’m a little uneasy about this, since I’m not sure how to go about it… apparently we are to take public transit, since a private car will be too expensive, but I am afraid for the security of my luggage on a big bus or car rapide type vehicle…). In any case, we were told by UNFPA to go back to Dakar on Saturday and we will leave early Sunday for Tamba with Senghor. However, Oulèye wants to go back to Dakar Friday night to spend more time with her family, and I’m not about to stay in this house alone for a night, so I guess I have to go back on Friday, too. That means 2 nights in a hotel in Dakar, which is going to cost me over $100.00. I’m not jazzed about this.

In any case, it will, of course, be nice to have some time alone before I make the long voyage to Tamba, where I’ll be greeted by 112 degree weather (so I’m told!) and some very different (and more difficult?) working conditions that what I’ve been dealing with in Mbour. All in all, I’m excited to see Tamba, to embark on our second study locale, and to reunite with some of my beloved New Schoolers!