On Wednesday after fine tuning our questions the night before, we first spent our day working with our translators on changing our new additions to Krio. We then went to a local copy stand and printed copies of the translated surveys as well as more consent statements to give to respondents. They only had one Inkjet printer which struggled with our 400 copies, so we sat down and talked to some people outside of a storefront. While avoiding the rain, we met a surveyor who worked to map out the local landscape of the city. We headed out to survey around 12:00pm and walked to a nearby neighborhood off of a main street in Makeni. There were many storefronts as it was closer to a stretch of the main road with lots of shops.
This area of Makeni seemed to be busier than the village we interviewed at the previous day and had more people sitting out on their porches with their families.
We interviewed a senior secondary school geography teacher outside of a primary school and found out school is on a month and a half holiday at the moment for the rainy season. It was interesting to see a primary school in the area and we met some really sweet kids, including the son of our respondent, who was taking summer classes so he wouldn’t forget any material over break (He was so cute). A World Hope International sign on the building suggests that WHI collaborates with this school and it was great to see the organization’s efforts in the local community firsthand, especially since mentioning our affiliation with them is so well received by our respondents. Lindsay was proposed to by someone in the village but politely declined. Overall, it was good to see that our revisions to the survey made the interviews clearer without excessively increasing interview time.
It was raining on our way to dinner, so we rode inside the pickup truck this time (see photo below). After dinner we went back to the hotel and Javier and Paolo prepared for our meeting tomorrow with Statistics Sierra Leone, as they would be doing most of the talking. We were able to finish the day with a total of 18 completed interviews, which was not bad timing for half a day.
