Today was an insanely busy but productive day for the malnutrition team! The day began with World Hope providing us with an intern from the University of Freetown to help us out with our research. Her name is Futia and she’s studying social work.
(Futia making homemade peanut butter)
From there, we had to confirm the plans that we had set in place for the day and prepare all of our samples that we needed for our taste testing at both World Hope and Wesleyan Church. Seanna talked with Mo-Mo and guaranteed that women and children were arriving at the WHI at 11:00 AM and Kayla was able to confirm with Reverend David that the he had been spreading the word of our taste testing throughout the villages for the last few days. Simultaneously, Chris was working on making another batch of Magic Muffins.
(Chris mixing the batter for the muffins)
(Kayla, Chris, Matt, Rachel, and Futia preparing the samples)
These batches came out perfectly and were ready to serve just in time!
(The muffins when they were just out of the oven)
When the muffins and the pudding were ready to serve, we had our very first taste test!! Whoo-hoo! It was a huge success in the sense that we were able to collect data and gain experience completing the surveys and working with our translators.
(Neena administering surveys with some of the mothers and children)
(Kayla talking with one of the 6-24 months)
However, during a meeting that we had with Khanjan after the tasting ended, we established that this was going to be a pilot run and we would not be able to use any of the data that we collected. Talking through our survey and interviewing process with Khanjan, we decided that we needed to create a more systematic method as well as set in place goals for our team to accomplish in the next few weeks.
Our team needs to
- Find and apply for funding to continue our research in the future
- Write the outline and methodology for a future paper
- Establish the different variables that are in play throughout our research study
- Create a matrix of the different recipes we want to compare and analyze for both teams
- Update the IRB protocol
It felt like things were really shifted into gear for the malnutrition team. We knew what we had to do and we were determined on getting everything done. At 4 PM Kayla, Karli, Yakuba, and Matt headed over to the Wesleyan Church to meet with Reverend David and set up the location in which we would be administering the taste tests and surveys. Since we knew that this tasting would be a larger group of people, we had four interviewers, four interpreters, and a three floaters. Kayla, Neena, Seanna, and Rachel were interviewing with Yakuba, Emanuel, Futia, and Alexander as interpreters. The testing at the church was absolutely chaotic – there were roughly 200 mothers and children who showed up.
(Taste testing at Wesleyan Church)
As a result of the chaos, we weren’t able to get a ton of data points, but the ones we did manage to collect were really helpful. Moving forward we are going to work through avoiding mass crowds swarming the interviews and trying to keep the taste testings in more of an orderly fashioned manner. We are so excited to finally be collecting tangible data and be working through the hiccups we faced and continue being successful.
(Malnutrition team enjoying the beautiful sunset in the back of a truck)