Our team landed yesterday and had our first working day in Sierra Leone today. We began our day with a visit to the World Hope International office in Makeni, a close drive from our hotel. WHI introduced us to some of their social ventures and described some of the challenges and successes of their projects. It was interesting to hear that the varying continued successes of their projects were heavily dependent on the passion and dependability of the Sierra Leoneans on the ground; without dedication the work couldn’t be sustained. It was also exciting to see how successful some of their ventures are as we began working on the ground with them today. Next, we met with two translators to see if they would fit well into our project and could effectively help translate our interviews into one of the common Sierra Leonean languages, Krio. We ran through mock interviews with the translators to ensure that they understood the purpose and meaning of questions on the survey and got feedback on some questions that needed to be rephrased. One translator didn’t understand a question about his average monthly income as he was usually used to a salary being daily or weekly and not consistent. It was very helpful to get feedback on questions like this which would likely give us problems when we start interviews tomorrow. After training the translators and rephrasing the survey, we gave the questions to the translators. This allowed them to translate the survey in advance which will save us time when we go to administer it. As using translators changed our IRB considerations a little, we then worked to gather the required altered documents and sent them to the IRB for another approval. After that we went to the restaurant for dinner in the back of a truck (see photo below) and are now back at the Makeni River Resort Hotel where we are staying. We are excited to start with data collection tomorrow!

Team picture!