Well yesterday was perhaps one of the most pathetic Halloween's I have ever celebrated. People here do not eat a lot of sweets but even with that in mind, April and I went out in search of some chocolate to celebrate. After a bike around town we discovered zero chocolate; it appears that Ghana is only a cocoa bean producer and not processor which does not make me happy. In the end our Halloween treat consisted of strange plastic-y tasting caramel candies, some malt n' milk biscuits, and a sprite. Such is celebrating a mostly American holiday in a foreign country.
In other news I finally have a set research project and have my questionnaire all finished up. I will be looking at the effects of breastfeeding beliefs, knowledge, and practices on child nutrition. As I said in the last post, we have been given a field worker each to help us carry out data collection since most of it will not be done in English. My worker, Joanna, is 22 and is really nice; she has worked at the Centre before for NDSS so she is familiar with data collection which is great. She also speaks both Kasem and Nankam which means that there are no limits on who we survey. I went over to a clinic that was going on at the hospital on Tuesday to do a pilot run of my survey which went surprisingly well. The moms interviewed understood the questions and there were only a few minor changes that I needed to make which made me really happy. The next big hurdle to overcome before really starting data collection is finding transportation. I am going to EPI (expanded programme on immunization) and child welfare clinics as thats where I will find the greatest concentration of breastfeeding women. April is doing her project on pregnant moms and she needs to go to antenatal clinics. The problem is that the clinics are in different places on different days, and that means all over the district. Both April and I have to figure out how to transport us and our workers to these clinics and while Georgetown will pay for whatever mode of transportation we use, there are all sorts of hurdles within the Centre to secure a truck or bikes or whatever we may need. I also wanted to start data collection this week but Ashley is surveying at EPI/child welfare clinics as well and having too many of us at one location would be problematical. Hopefully on Monday I will be going out for my first full day of data collection. If all goes well I should be able to get my 120 surveys in two weeks and then I will have another two weeks for data entry/analysis before presenting my results to the senior staff here. So it looks as though this month is going to be more than a little bit crazy.
There isn't a whole lot else to report. Last weekend the three of us biked out to the Tono Dam nice and early in the morning which was fun. We managed to navigate our way through town on a market day on our bikes which was slightly terrifying, especially on the way home when, in addition to market traffic, there was a political rally/parade going through town. I am surprised that none of us had an accident (there were many close calls). And despite being back at the Centre before noon, we all managed to get slightly sunburned. Other than that there hasn't been anything interesting to report. I can't believe that we are 2/3 of the way through our internships (we finish up at the beg. of Dec and then are traveling for 2 weeks)...I never thought the time here would go that quickly. In fact one of the girls who was here last year asked me whether Navrongo had bored us to death yet and I can honestly say that I have never once been stir crazy here. Sure there are slow days, but nothing has made me want to get out of here. Well that is all for now--I hope everyone is doing well!
