not so much with the brevity

Sorry I haven't posted in a while, but we started surveying borrowers on Monday and it's been an insane, consuming, and tiring undertaking. Before I delve into that, I will reassure you, as if it is even necessary, that I was not on a commuter train in Mumbai and was not hurt or killed in the bombing. I'm deeply embarassed to say that I don't really know anything about it. I got a worried email from B and so I called my mom and said, "Did something bad happen in India?" I had a fantasy that I would keep up with world events while here by reading NYT.com and Economist.com, but there's only so long I care to spend in one of these internet places, and I prefer to spend it writing my blog and reading (and occasionally responding to) correspondence. M and E were watching TV at Broadlands when I left to grab some dinner and then come here, and I think there was a thing on TV about it, but I wasn't even really paying attention. For some reason a bombing seems like no big deal these days. A sad state of affairs, I suppose.

So, surveying. This whole summer research project is, as you know, a requirement of my master's program. Therefore, I believe it is best regarded as a learning experience, a sort of "real world" class in field researching. I say this because the surveying itself, like all the work that led up to it, has not really turned out as we had expected or hoped, and in three days I have learned a LOT about what to do and not do.

This was the general plan: IMED's Field Assistants (FAs) conduct around 3 borrower group meetings a day. M, E, and I would each take 3 of the enumerators we hired (actually, E takes 4, since we hired 10) and tag along with the FA to the three meetings. We have randomly pre-selected the six borrowers we want to interview at each meeting, plus four alternates in case some are absent (if a randomly chosen borrower is absent, you should really go back and survey them later, or else your data might be biased, but that's a whole other story). We thought that we would get to the meetings, and they would do the usual meeting stuff: say a prayer, do their borrower pledge, take attendance, and do repayment accounting. After that, the FA is supposed to do a training module. We figured that during the module, we'd take the first three women outside and the enumerators would survey them, and then they'd go back in, and we'd get the next three, and there would be minimal disruption to the meeting itself.

Well, let me tell you. First of all, whether the meeting even happens is questionable. Sometimes the group leader is sick or something, so you end up sort of rounding up any six women from the group you can find and surveying them. Sometimes meetings happen, but they don't do the pledge and stuff like you think they're going to, and you're not sure why. Sometimes lots of people are absent. Sometimes two meetings are back-to-back in the same place, so one meeting has ended and another has begun and somehow you have not noticed. Oh, and forget taking 3 women outside to be surveyed. EVERYONE comes outside if you do that, and not only do they watch, but they answer questions for the women, talk to the enumerators, etc. And you don't know what they're saying or what is happening because it's all in Tamil, and the enumerators supposedly all speak English, but quite frankly, their English usually sucks. Also, our survey is apparently written in a confusing way, so we've had to do a great deal of explaining in order to try to get the answers we are looking for. And you never know when an enumerator is making up an answer just because he wants to please you and get done. And you never know what crazy thing a borrower will say. I had two today that claimed not to have small businesses, even though you have to have one to get a loan. It turns out that this woman is a tailor and has a sewing machine, but for some reason answered the questions that would elicit these responses in the negative. Oh, and hardly anyone has business assets (like a sewing machine) because most of the businesses are very non-capital intensive, and I'm supposed to be writing my thesis about business asset acquisition, so, hmmm...

On the other hand, the enumerators are nice guys, and they are learning pretty quickly and by today (their third day) were doing pretty well. All the borrowers are super-nice, and I usually get to play with at least one adorable baby a day, so that's nice. In fact, I have no idea why I find surveying so tiring, because I don't actually do that much. I just look over the completed surveys to find missing stuff, then try to explain what is missing and what they need to ask the borrower, all the while trying desperately to understand what is going on and make sure the right people are being interviewed, if possible.

Another thing about surveying is actually going to the borrowers' neighborhoods. There's plenty of intense poverty just steps away from where I live (there's plenty of it everywhere, really), but I saw some especially intense stuff in the last couple days. Examples: on two separate occasions, a little boy taking a shit on the side of the road (sorry to be so crude, but I somehow feel there's no other way to say it); tiny, furnitureless concrete houses in tiny, labirynthine shanty town-esque places; lots of goats eating from huge piles of garbage; a woman (only 35 years old) who had just died, shrouded in a white sheet and covered with flowers, surrounded by her sobbing, wailing family and friends in the middle of the street. I haven't really talked about the poverty and my reactions to it on this blog much, mostly because it's overwhelming and I don't know how I feel. Now that I see how hard it is to get good, consistent, unbiased data out in the field, what I'm doing seems that much more useless in the face of so much need. But because it is everywhere, and because the poor go about their lives just like the rest of us, it begins to seem normal and I stop caring about it. I stop caring if microfinance works or not, because how can it really matter?

But I think it does matter, and I'm still not ready to give up being a development economist. Give me a couple more days, and we'll see...

On a lighter note, on the second morning of surveying, BJ (the nice young guy who works at OI and has heled us a ton) called me on my cell and in a very awkward and apologetic way told me that he heard from the people at the Saidapet branch that some of the enumerators were making some comments (in Tamil, of course) about, as BJ tactfully put it, cleavage. So he wanted (again, so apologetically) to make sure I would be coming in to the office wearing something as non-cleavage-y as possible (he didn't actually use the world "non-cleavage-y"). He also let M know, but I'm pretty sure the enumerators were talking about me. The thing is, I know that I can't go around wearing the stuff that I wear in the US when I'm around modest female borrowers and 21-year-old Indian guys (who according to BJ have the emotional maturity of a 13-year-old) while working with a conservative Christian organization. What I was wearing, as far as I could tell, was perfectly appropriate. It was a short sleeved button-down top, and I had it buttoned up past my cleavage. It is possible that if I were leaning over you would have been able to see the tiniest bit of something, but not really. And halfway through the day I even buttoned the top button just in case. The problem, I think, is that at one point toward the beginning of the day, when we were giving the enumerators their initial briefing, one of the buttons in the middle came undone, and who knows how long it took me to notice. But it's not like I had a boob hanging out. And you all know that shirts that other people can wear without showing cleavage might show cleavage on me because there's more there to show, so today, since I wore a perfectly innocent v-neck top, I had to wear a scarf around my shoulders to basically cover my whole chest area. So it's kind of annoying. Furthermore, because pale skin is considered beautiful (and a novelty) here, and because the standard female body ideal is a bit heavier here than in the states, I tend to get some unwanted attention from Indian guys. I was talking to one guy in Mamalapuram a couple weeks ago, and he was telling me that he is illiterate, and that he wants to go back to school but is scared to, and I was encouraging him and telling him that his spoken English is excellent, and telling him that I would teach him the English alphabet, and he put his arm around me, and said, "You're so beautiful, you teach me whatever you want." So here I think I'm having a great cultural bonding moment, but it's just some guy hitting on me. Lovely.

A few other things have happened since I last wrote, like me yelling at another rickshaw driver and having 2 more milks at Sparky's, but nothing particularly exciting. Oh, and a happy birthday shoutout to T, whom I thought of all day today as I wrote the date on the completed surveys. And an apology and an exactly one month late happy birthday shoutout to IB, who's birthday passed without me acknowledging it. But I still had jet lag on 12 June, so that's the excuse I'm sticking with.

More pictures soon, more about surveys soon. I miss everyone so much. But I'm also feeling pretty good, very self-confident and capable. I think India is good for that.