Spending time in the field

It’s Sunday morning and the compound is quiet. I even got to sleep in until after 10am, which was a luxurious indulgence after a series of days where I was up before the sun, finding my way to the latrine with the aid of my head lamp.

I posted earlier that there was a consultant here to do my job and I would get to relax. Unfortunately it didn’t pan out that way and instead I found myself out in the field doing data collection in villages with the teams that I am meant to be coordinating.  The requests for assistance that kept sending me field-bound were consistently from the team led by one of the only single guys in the compound. Coincidence? Probably. But I’m suspicious. And so is everyone else.

At least I really like traipsing around villages. It’s hot, hard, sweaty, dirty work, but I love getting to meet people and see what life is like. Plus the kids are always entertaining.

Our job was to find children under 5 and collect their anthropometric data (height, weight etc), and ask their mothers a series of questions that will help to ascertain the health status of the community. I worked on the anthropometric aspect, which included using a height board to measure the kids, and hanging them from a cloth sling attached to a scale that hung from a wooden rod, held at shoulder level between two adults, to get their weight. Many of them didn’t like this, and frankly, I don’t blame them.

It was usually not very difficult to figure out where I was in the village. The Under 5’s we were measuring were often screaming. Plus, I would gather a bit of an entourage, mostly consisting of kids (who should probably have been in school). They would follow us around and watch inquisitively, often pointing out my tattoo or the bits of my hair that were falling out of my cap. Eventually, one would get up enough courage to shake my hand, and then everyone else would want to as well. It took some of them a couple of tries before they had the nerve to actually make contact, but then one handshake was never enough and I’d eventually have to ignore them and get back to work. In one village, my translator told me that one child exclaimed that “her hands are so soft!”, which explained why I was then subject to a barrage  of unexpected strokes from other kids,  “and her arm!”, “and her leg!”.

Taking photos is technically illegal in Sudan. So the only ones I have are of an old lady we visited as our last stop, who was gracious enough to let us sit in her shade while we waited for the rest of our team. She excused herself to put on her best dress when we arrived, and wanted to be sure you could all see her pipe and her house.

At the end of the day, we would wearily make our way back to the river, slide carefully down the bank and climb back into the boat to make our way back to the compound. 

To celebrate the end of the data collection, and the arrival of the new Area Coordinator, we planned a party last night. We had beer, wine and whiskey. We played loud music and  projected music videos onto the side of the building. We kept the generator on way past its bedtime. We bbq'd a goat, and despite my previous comments about refusing to eat goat, bbq goat is lovely (unlike stewed goat). We didn't have quite as much meat as we expected, because only a few hours before we were set to kill the goat we had been fattening up, it delivered a baby. Which meant that our fat and delicious goat was really just preggers and we had to resort to Plan B, which was a less well nourished, but still very tasty alternative. (For the record, I'm thoroughly thankful that the baby was born just in the nick of time - it is adorable!)

And now it is Sunday, and the generator is about to be turned off for it's afternoon break, so I think it's time for me to take a nap.