Assessment survey part 1

July 19

We have done three days of interviews so far, and it’s been really interesting. Things have gone surprisingly well, after one of our translators evaporated the day before interviews began. We have reached our target number of interviews every day, and we got to the field on time! (The leaving on time thing may not seem like an accomplishment, but we are on “African standard time” here, which means that everything is late, even scheduled bus departures.) It’s interesting to realize that things we never thought would be cultural hurdles are actually posing lots of problems. For example, when we wrote the questionnaire and translated it, we checked with the Rwandese at work to make sure that none of the questions were culturally inappropriate. We have some about family planning, and we weren’t sure if it would make people uncomfortable. There are also questions that ask about the clients’ interactions with spouse/extended family, but those are touchy also because so many people lost their whole family during genocide. So, we fixed those problems, found ways to ask what we wanted to without being insensitive, but it never occurred to us to ask about the form of the questionnaire itself. It turns out that questionnaires like this are a very western concept, and the multiple choice questions are really difficult for people to understand. Who knew? One the questions that really throws people is this:

Describe your ability to meet your family’s food needs:
a) I am able to provide all the food my family needs, and it is not a concern.
b) I am able to provide all the food my family, needs, but I wish I could buy more food.
c) I am not able to provide all the food my family needs, and I sometimes worry about this.
d) I am not able to provide all the food my family needs, and I worry about this all the time.

It seemed straightforward to us, and it doesn’t even have a western bias because it asks about needs being met, not a number of meals per day or how often they eat protein, so we thought it was a pretty great question. But, it takes about 5 minutes to explain every time we do an interview. Dinah, my translator and fellow intern, tried valiantly yesterday, but we were in a poor, rural, uneducated area, and there was only one woman who seemed to really know what she was answering. The rest of them eventually said something, but Dinah thought they were just saying it so she would move on. The funniest part about it is that we are so embarrassed that we’re asking questions that are hard to understand, but the Rwandese interpreters are like, “Well, these people are just really ignorant, so we’ll do our best but sometimes they just don’t get it.” The other thing that’s hard to get at is anything that deals with the time-space continuum. The section at the beginning that deals with background info asks things like how long have you been a client, how many loan cycles have you been through, etc. People just say they don’t know, or they say it has been very many, but they don’t know how many. The only ones who are really sure about it are people who joined right after genocide, in 1997. And many of our questions are before and after scenarios, like the food one above has a part B that asks them to describe the differences in their situation before and after receiving a loan. Today was better, though, because we were in Kigali city, and the people who are in town are generally more educated. Must run, dinner is on.