Accelerated in Armenia

It must be the cold weather for the PDA team of Guram, Nune(1), Sophik, Margarita and, last but not least, Nune(2)are about 1/2 day ahead of schedule. This is day three (Wednesday) of my visit to the Save the Children office here in Yerevan Armenia. At this point, I have shrugged off most of the effects of the jet lag (I am awakening at a decent time in the morning now). Also, by experience, I can tell how successful we are as a team based on where we are along in the training outline and how involved I am in the training.



The latter is much more indicative of our progress. I know we are ahead of schedule from several aspects. I spent about 1/2 hour at the beginning of our session today conducting a review of yesterdays efforts, asking for comments or suggestions (in case I need to adjust the agenda). I also felt they were ready to take a look at a pretty sophisticated form built by the Uganda Save the Children team last August. We first looked closely at the paper form and then at the construct of the resulting PDA form. This gave the team an idea of some more advanced methods of form construct, but I could tell that they were anxious to return to the form that they had nearly finished late yesterday.



I am continuing to see a development in my training sessions at our different country offices. The challenge is not in understanding how to use the PDA's, nor how to use the software. The challenge is always in first understanding the structure and logic of the paper form. Again, we are building mobile databases. Peper forms just do not automatically insert into a PDA and begin to work. Weaknesses and failings in a paper form become amplified and evident on a PDA.

I am beginning to develop a severe mistrust of paper survey forms. They are just sitting there deceptively winking at me with those big blue textual eyes saying, I am really so simple..... Emphatically NO. I am finding that even the simplest form has hidden, non-articulated instructions and meanings. As an example, yesterday it took the team a couple of hours until the two-page form of forty-two question was agreed upon. Until I observe all of their heads nodding up and down do I encourage them to lay their fingers on the keyboard and hands on the laptop mouse to begin designing the form. I will attempt to describe this subtle deception on the part of the paper form later.

For the balance of the morning, I stood at the far end of the room and simply observed their form design progress on the projector screen. Actually I am actively engaged in watch their team discussions. I am hesitant to interrupt their decision-making process except where they reach a stalemate (even then I usually do not intrude), or see them proceeding down a wrong path. The team made excellent progress. I can tell, because even when I thought I should reinforce my trainer ego by suggesting a change, I received a polite wave-off, and they promptly solved the problem. I am proud of them.

A pleasant surprise is with Nune(1), who is the technology focal. This means that everyone is happy with her until their computer misbehaves or emails ceases to function. Ah, I remember those days of adrenaline. Nune not only constructs Microsoft Access databases, but she also has recently received training in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology. This office is well-poised for managing data and presenting in an intelligible easily retrievable manner. The Country Office Director, Irina Saghoyan, discussed this priority with me on my first day.



Another distinguished advantage for this office is the incomparable Vera. Vera cooks and hosts the lunch time meal here on the office premises. This not only spares an exit out onto the frozen suburban tundra at noon (even at midday, it is below freezing), but I have the chance to sample something other than see-it-is-just-like-in-America hotel food. Vera cooks and presents delicious meals which make me feel like I am at her home. Everyone sings her praises and I will add myself to that chorus.

Tomorrow, on our fourth day (Thursday), we will have finished the second test form. I will then have them role-play as interviewer-respondent with their PDA-installed creations. This activity is intended to extract them from their technical activities and to prepare for the human interaction during our field visit in Friday.

This is NOT the Tropics!

I checked into my room at the Hotel Congress in Yerevan. This hotel is only five years old, and even though it is a small room, it is very clean and well maintained. I will like it here. I have only been able to connect to the internet for a brief time. My hotel bathroom has an interesting device to warm the towels. I noticed a ladder like device made of tubular steel hanging on the wall adjacent to the shower stall. It actually had a plug in the bottom with a power light. I turned it on and I did not notice it blink or emit any sounds. Later, I found that it had heating coils in the contraption that gently warmed the two towels hanging on it. I like this idea.

Of course, due to the 12 hours of jetlag that I am experiencing, I awoke bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at 2:30AM. It will be Wednesday before I am close to adjusting to a normal circadian rhythm. I spent Sunday resting and making the final touches to my introductory Power Point presentation and training plan. I also took the opportunity to continue work for my visit to our Save the Children Country office in Malawi. I will depart a week from Wednesday and fly down to that small country in Africa. I will need to connect with a flight to Kenya through Heathrow airport in London. Even then, I will not be able to fly directly to the airport outside of the capital city of Lilongwe. I will arrive there via a brief stop in Lusaka, Zambia directly to the west of Malawi.



It is very cold here in Yerevan. During my meeting with Irina Saghoyan, the Armenia Country Officer Director, she mentioned that it was unseasonably cold even for here. I do not feel that it is very bad, but I think it is -10 degrees centigrade overnight. I brought along plenty of warm clothes so I will be fine.



My driver Karen (a warm friendly man about my age) picked me up promptly at 9AM. I have just finished my 1st half day of training. I found that I needed to adjust my training schedule. Delightfully, the PDA’s that I scattered throughout the conference room table came quickly into the hands of the team. I had to give them a good ½ hour just trying the PDA’s out and inputting data in the test forms that I provided. We then agreed to a schedule for the next six days which included a field visit on Friday. Margarita, whom I met during a Design, Monitoring and Evaluation (DM&E) conference in Istanbul back in October 2005, offered to take me to the crafts market here in Yerevan this weekend. The Armenia culture is rich and the people very friendly.

A Paris Regression

I am here in the capital city of Yerevan and is it cold here. There will be more on that later. When I met my Save the Children driver upon my exit from Immigration at the airport here, I could see on his face that I was not ready to encounter the sub-freezing weather outside the terminal clothed in my light cordouroy coat. Ah, but I came armed with my heaviest down coat, Thinsolite gloves and woolen pull-over-the-ears hat.

I neglected to finish writing about my return trip from the Save the Children USA offices in Mali and Guinea last December. I was pleased with the outcome of the assessment of whether our Country Office there, collectively called Sahel, should go to paperless data collection in some of their programs. I am looking forward to hear the reports of how they will implement the use of Personal Digital Assistants (PDA’s).

During the second week of my trip, the team traveled to the neighboring country of Guinea, specifically the city of Kankan. I really enjoyed working with the group there. The Save the Children office was superb but, I will not describe the general hygiene in the city at large, specifically the toilet facilities. Several times my meals were offered warm which I politely refused. This is why I always bring small packaged snacks with me especially during trips to field locations to test our PDA forms.

Well, sure enough, I picked up a virus. This is actually the first time that it was viral and not a bacterial opportunist in my alimentary system. I was actually feeling fine until I departed from the plane at Charles de Gaulle airport outside of Paris on my return from Mali. I was hurrying to another terminal for my connect flight. Suddenly, while standing on a moving walk way, my last meal was urging to exit from the upper reaches – right there on the walkway. This is how you know it is viral, since if it is bacterial, it will want to void itself from lower down. I want to you spare any other descriptors, but at the time I was struggling not to make myself a spectacle right there in the airport. I recovered slightly after a safety net trip to a handicapped toilet facility to achieve some privacy just in case I involuntarily became a human fountain. I still had a couple of hours until my flight back to Seattle. I needed to determine my flight gate before I vainly traveled to another terminal.

Somehow, I found myself on the relatively deserted upper floor above the main terminal. The large expanse of this floor was empty except for a column surround by a low tableau which allowed me to sit my briefcase on and at the same time to lean against. Instead of an opaque wall In front of me, there was what must have a 40 foot glass wall extending down to the ticketing/security area below. Behind this glass was an equally high departing flight reader board. My flight was still too far in the future to be displayed, but here I found refuge. I attempted to return to this location on my visit to this same airport yesterday enroute to Armenia, but I was stopped by a security guard.


My nausea had now subsided, but I was struck by an overwhelming desire to sleep. In fact this after effect of the virus extended for the next three days. Afterwards, I was fine with no ill effects, which was confirmed by my personal doctor. But here, I struggled to remain awake. I wrapped my fanny pack harness into a Gordian styled knot with my briefcase. I set my PDA alarm to the highest decibel level just prior to the time I would have to reach my gate. But would unfold was far more interesting to my bodies need for rest. During the next couple of hours, other sojourners of airport catacombs would find themselves approaching me. I would first hear their footsteps which would arouse my from an uncomfortable doze. Looking up I would find a person obviously lost. Well, I found myself on my feet and asking them for their boarding pass. Then we would jointly scan the huge reader board from our vantage point to determine their gate. I spoke with a young Vietnamese man (my assumption, since he arrived from Ho Chi Minh City). There was also the young Iranian lady, and several others with that look of panic on their faces. Of course they each warily approached me for want of directions and solace from another traveler. Still, I must of presented a suspicious visage. I was anticipating a visit from security based on my image showing up in some distant control room via the ubiquitous cameras overhead.

I got onto my flight and promptly fell asleep. Imagine me, the person who loves flying and takeoffs asleep as we lifted off of the European continent! Once, I stirred from my slumber. The lady sitting a couple of seats from me suggested that I could probably get something to eat in the galley since I had missed the meal. She subtly leaned away from me as I told her I that I was just returning from a Third World country and that I had picked up some intestinal virus. This was too much information that I hoped would not result in a quarantine for me when I arrived in the U.S.

Armenia and (where is?) Malawi

I am preparing to depart out of Sea-Tac airport from my home state of Washington (West Coast). I am on my way to conduct training for paperless data collection for the Save the Children USA country offices (CO) in Yerevan, Armenia east of Turkey and Lilongwe, Malawi in southern Africa. My flights will total over 26,000 miles. My two flights to Armenia, a ten hour segment to Paris, then 4 ½ hours to Yerevan, will go quickly. The 12 hour jet lag will be not so easily accommodated, but I will arrive one day early so that I am not totally incoherent on the first training day.

My return flight from Malawi will be much more exhausting. I need to fly south to Johannesburg prior to a ten hour flight back up to Paris. Then, there will be another 10 hour flight to Seattle. That will be a 50 hour set of travel days. Enough of my whining. It is the hot and humid summer in Malawi, but I will be fortunate to see the thermometer hit above freezing while in Armenia. I love it!

The airport is just 10 minutes south of Seattle. In order to see my wife Heidi just before I left, she dropped me off at the airport shuttle at 5:15 AM, even though my flight does not depart until 2:05 PM. I did not mind, as if I took the appropriate shuttle in order to arrive the suggested three hours prior to departure, I would of only gained a couple of hours.

Also, I love arriving early at the airport in order to avoid the frenetic pace and admittedly entertain myself with the antics of late arrives. With most humor, we are amused, because either it has, or could conceivably happen to ourselves. Yes, I have raced through airports more than once. Plus, it can be rewarding to be in a more relaxed disposition to be available to assist someone near in line that may not be in similar attitude.

To risk banality, airports are interesting places. For instance, most everyone by necessity must go to the grocery store due to the obvious. However, not everyone needs to go to the airport. I first noticed this years ago in almost a cruel observation. I was at our local Department of Licensing office needing to renew my driver’s license. This is bureaucracy at its best. All the while I am thankful that I do not enjoy such a secure job. I try to be very patient both with the clients as well as the people behind the counters. The employees know the processes backwards and forwards. Yet, continually they are confronted with people like me, who have either forgotten the process, or just mentally stutter from having to endure it again.

Remember, this is a potential Pass/Fail scenario and even though the latter rarely happens except for the distal points of one’s’ driving career. The employees are almost always without fail courteous and thoughtful. It reminds me of the continual reoccurrence of questions that I answered a multitude of times during computer application or PC support. “Why doesn’t the screen come up?” “My printer does not print?” “Do you think that it is my mouse?” You must pass on your knowledge with a smile and wisdom – always.

Anyway, while sitting in the licensing department, I would see persons walk in the door who evidently had not left their household environment since the last bureaucratic venture. You could see the look on their pale faces encountering persons of presumed authority so that they could continue their enfranchised right of driving on streets that pale in relation to those in the capital cities of emerging countries. The social skills often had deteriorated, and the individual reaction to stress varied according to the person’s demeanor. Some would become angry, while others shrank back towards the water fountain. It was a display of classic “fight or flight” syndrome. I enjoyed watch for the elderly, in particular, and offer to guide them to the right form or line to stand in. Perhaps I should have remained quiescent since I recall the glare from an elderly woman when I had mistakenly directed her to the line for a Class II long haul license. The bureaucratic experts soon rescued her from my ill-placed intentions.



Airports, on the other hand, are different. Most people are frequent flyers and are accustomed to getting out of the darkened spaces of a domestic refuge. Still, and I still share this, there are many who have that deer-in-the-headlights stare. I am confident that someone at the Yerevan airport in Armenia will be waiting to amuse – and to gently and wisely assist – themselves when I arrive not knowing the process in an unfamiliar setting. It always comes around…

Not an ATM in Sight

Well, actually there is ONE. Can you believe it? In this country of Mali, there is but one ATM at the central bank in downtown Bamako, the capital city where I have returned after a few days training and testing in neighboring Guinea. I was forewarned of this dearth of ATM machines before my departure from the U.S. Cash is King here in Mali, declared the Save the Children Country Office director, Dunni Goodman. It is always a bit risky carrying so much cash on one's person. Travelers checks are not generally accepted, nor are credit cards. My hotel accepted my debit card, but my travel Visa card was not accepted even though it had more than adequate funds.



Enough of the funds stricture here. My work is completed, as I gave my exit presentation and recommendations to the senior managers here at Save the Children. On Wednesday late afternoon, I returned to Bamako from three days of training in Kankan, Guinea with Bamadio and Soro, my Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E), and Information Technology (IT) hosts, respectively. I stopped in to speak with Ms. Goodman for what i thought would be a brief moment. Instead, she asked me to sit down and asked if I would provide a presentation on PDA technology to their partner, Catholic Relief Services (CRS) here in Bamako. I said, sure, I'd love to. Save is co-developing a proposal to The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) for a Multi Year Assistance Program (MYAP) to alleviate food shortages (food insecurity) in an area to the north here in Mali.

Before I started my presentation, the CRS Director, Karen Kent gave me her paper survey horror story which occurred just the prior week. They had expended much cost and effort to conduct a baseline survey for one of their programs. A baseline is conducted to determine the structure of the program area, i.e. population, nutrition needs, etc. The box of the completed surveys was placed on a bus for transport back to their office in Bamako. That box has still not arrived...

The short of my presentation at CRS was a directive from Ms. Kent, to include PDA's in their collaborative MYAP proposal to reduce overall program costs for data collection and to increase data accuracy.



I took nearly 500 photos of the villages alone that I have visited. Many are posted on my image-sharing website http:\\disaak.phanfare.com. we spent an afternoon testing our PDA survey instruments at the village of Bate Nafadji, where Save has a Child Safety program implemented. As we drove the 4 hours from Bamako, Mali, to the Save office in Kanakan, Guinea, I saw a series of this "safe" houses along the highway. The intent is to inform and make aware the communities of the dangers of child exploitation resulting in child trafficking. A highway is a perfect conduit to obtain and transport children for various purposes, other than what a child should be doing.



As the three PDA-wielding teams dispersed through the village to conduct interviews, I was lead to a large room filled with students. It happened again, I was warmly greeted by a loud recitation of lessons and welcoming speeches. I am always overwhelmed at this reception, in part, because no such acclaim should be given to me; I have a return airplane ticket ot the U.S. The real heroes are the staff and students. i was also shown a room full of old treadle-style sewing machines. A student who had graduated from the Child safety program has remained in the village and now teaches a viable skill to boys and girls (this is gender notable). A marketable skill is still yet another weapon against child trafficking!



I then found the three teams as each team member took turns using the PDA's to survey a head of household. As usual, everyone took to the PDA's effortlessly, respondent as well as interviewer. A post-interview meeting was held before we headed back to the office.

I need to do some packing and head to bed. I return to the U.S. tomorrow

In Kankan - Republic of Guinea

I arrived at the Save the Children office here in Kankan after a five hour drive on an excellent paved highway from Bamako, Mali. I will not be able to write very much, since I discovered that in this large city, there is not a functioning electrical infrastructure. Last evening we drove about in total darkness to a tiny restaurant. We ate by candle light. Of course, the people have battery power for limited lighting, and you may always discern the loud diesel-powered generators. The later we enjoyed both at the Save the Children office and our overnight residence.



We avoided the cost of a hotel by staying at a residence owned by Save the Children. Electricity stopped at 1AM, but I retired under my mosquito net long before. In the morning after breakfast, we arrived back at the Save the Children office. A very capable staff is here. After introductions to the program managers and administrative staff, we utilized a large conference room to begin the training in mobile data collection.



i prefer to place the PDA's in the hands of the training participants as soon as possible. As usual, they rapidly begin experimenting and exploring the devices. Then, the efforts centered on a very lively discussion of the target survey form that we would design and place onto the PDA's for our field testing tomorrow. The form is to collect data from households regarding Child Safety in regards to awareness and education in Child Trafficking.



I always emphasize, that before we build the form on the PDA, we must understand the content, structure, and logic of the form. This is essential, and once again, a couple of hours was spent to arrive at agreement of these characteristics of the form.



I need to upload this blog entry since the generator is about to turn off, and with it, the internet connection.

Getting Connected in Mali

As is often the case in my trips to emerging nations, internet connectivity has been intermittent. It first failed at my hotel the Thursday evening before we left for the field. But, I am not here to connect with the rest of the world, but to connect with my partners here at the Save the Children in Mali – and the families and children. So, I will use the business center here at the hotel for the internet.



I have just returned from two days in the field. We traveled for a couple of hours to the villages of Klesokoro and Diambala in the Bougouni region, or known administratively as the Bougouni Aire Sante. After we left the capital city of Bamako. We traveled across a flat plain of scrub and trees. The roads were excellent with the occasional detour for road construction.



My French language speaking skills are slowly returning from my high schools days. They have increased in quality from listening to speaking, in that order. This area reminds me often of my travels in Haiti. I recall that a Save the Children friend once told me that Haiti is like West Africa transplanted, since many of the present day inhabitants of Haiti were forcibly moved from there. It is true, from what I have seen. I love it here.

Even though I have recovered from the effects of the jet lag, I felt some discomfort the first couple of days. I now believe, that it was the effects of the typhoid vaccine that I received just prior to my departure from the United States. Due to Save the Children’s generosity, I utilize the benefit of a traveler’s health service. Two years ago, I went to see the health doctor and to advise them of the countries I was about to visit. The doctor then advised me of what diseases were endemic in those locations and to administer appropriate vaccines. I was due for a typhoid update, so my travel health doctor suggested the newly approved oral typhoid vaccine which is good for five years. Instead of an inoculation from a needle, it is, as the name suggests, taken orally in the form of four capsules taken on alternating days. The instructions strongly urg keeping the unused capsules refrigerated at all times. They must be taken with food and even the water was to be cold and not warm. The instructions even said that the capsule should not be held in the mouth for too long before swallowing!



The vaccine itself, is termed attenuated, or a live form of the virus in a weakened state. By ingesting the virus, it then invokes an antigen response by the body’s immune system. Then, if the in-the-wild version is encountered, the body has the antigens already available to fight off the virus. Well, on my 2nd day here in Mali, I felt a slight distension of my upper abdomen and I felt chills in the evening. I recall that when I was inoculated with the Japanese encephalitis vaccine, I experienced the same effects. The abdominal distension is due to an enlargement of the spleen as it produces the antibodies. I watched this carefully and I had no apparent fever. If you think, “why would anyone subject their bodies to these foreign bodies”, then just do a Google search on the effects, and usually death, of the real non-attenuated, viruses! The vaccine contraindications are nothing compared to the real thing. Horrible stuff. You can watch a Hollywood version in the typhoid death of John Malkovich in Algeria in the movie Sheltering Sky. That is just too much screaming for me.

From Monday through Wednesday, my Monitoring and Evaluation partner, Modibo Bamadio and I reviewed a paper form questionnaire, called Zinkifura, which we wanted to test on the PDA’s. This questionnaire was in French and was used to interview mothers over their use of a zinc (hence, Zinkifura) supplement to offset the effects of diarrhea on their children less than five years of age. Diarrhea of course, is a response to the body to flush out harmful bacteria in the intestinal tract. In doing so, the body can overreact and lose too much water and become dangerously dehydrated. This is often the cause of death with cholera and other intestinal diseases.



We stayed overnight at a nice hotel in the city of Bougouni. The following morning we arrived at the Save the Children office nearby. Last names are used here in Mali for identifying persons. In Vietnam, it was middle names – all too confusing the first few days for this Westerner! We met Bamadio's M&E peer here in Bougouni, Zanna Daou (his name sound like Xanadu to my ears) to accompany us to the villages. The villages were not far away so we arrived by mid morning. The Bamako Country Office (CO) Information Technology (IT) person came with us. Adama Soro is a very friendly and capable IT person, having skills in Microsoft SL Server (the preferred database repository software located on a protected server), Visual Basic (a high level programming language and application development software).



In the early morning, I handed a PDA to Soro and two PDA’s to Bamadio, with the 2nd for Zanna. When Zanna arrived, I suggested that Bamadio provide some initial training to him in the use of the PDA. Bamadio did all of the right things. After turning the PDA on, Bamadio then came alongside Zanna so that Zanna could see the screen. Soon, Bamadio handed the PDA to Zanna to let him use it for himself. This might seem a small thing, but Bamadio not only transferred his technical knowledge to Zanna, but also enjoined trust with his partner with his subtle body language. This is vital during actual interviews. Paper forms on clipboard in the hands of interviewers often present a large physical barrier between interviewer and respondent. The interviewer will often shield themselves from the respondent using the clipboard.



The PDA’s smaller size allows a closer proximity to the respondent and is easier to show the respondent. Yet, since the screen is much smaller, the respondent often loses interest and then disengages from the data capture instrument and concentrates more fully on responding to the questions of the interviewer.

I always appreciate the IT person’s involvement on my visits. I emphasize from the first day, that we are not placing paper forms onto PDA's, we are building portable databases. The IT person is often pre-occupied with keeping the computers and servers up and running, but their skills are crucial to a centralized data management strategy Often CO’s have data contained in scattered, disparate spreadsheets, multiple Microsoft Access databases and even Microsoft Word documents (see, I have them in Word tables!). I always take the IT person aside and discuss a more centralized data management strategy and include it in my assessment report in order to provide knowledge and support to the managers.



We had loaded the test form onto 3 PDA’s. The form had a total of 70 questions, but we only used about 30 of those questions for field testing. Many of the questions were what are commonly termed skip questions. Skip questioning is, for example, when a mother answers Yes to the question, have you ever administered a zinc supplement to your baby? Then the PDA form screen automatically advances to the next series of questions asking the effects of the zinc dose on the child. If the mother answers No, then the questions pertaining to the effects of zinc administration are hidden automatically (through use of underlying scripts) and the PDA interviewer is then skipped to only the questions relevant for a respondent who has not administered zinc to their child, hence the term skip questioning.



I am finding that the skip questioning capability of PDA forms is a marked improvement over the functionality of paper survey forms. With a paper form, the interviewer must follow the logic of the answers and then shuffle through papers to the correct questions. This slows the interviews and distracts both respondent and interviewer, and at the worst, results in incorrect answers. It is pretty hard to sort through the answers while hand-typing in the data back at the office trying to determine the correct answer. If the mother answered yes, that she administered zinc to the child, why are the zinc administration answers blank! You can not easily return and rectify this problem easily.

As usual, at this point I am mostly observing the PDA users during the interviews. I am also entertaining the children with their photographs in order to make friends with them. Upon entering the village of Klekosoro, we approached unawares a mother and her 3 children in front of their house. When the children and saw the tall, light-skinned person approaching, they ran screaming into the house. I hate when that happens. I had been lagging behind taking pictures. I usually try to stay contained physically within the group so that I do not stand out so much. I blew it.



I spent my time principally with Zanna, while Bamadio and Soro went off to their interviews. Bamadio thoughtfully assigned a local young man to accompany us so that we could be re-directed to a common meeting point post-interview. Zanna began his interviews with a couple of mothers after about two minutes of turning on the PDA. I am finding that everyone takes to the PDA method of data collection quite easily everywhere that I travel.



The Pendragon software that we use for the PDA form design is easy to use, and it has a simple, intuitive interface on the PDA. At the same time Pendragon can be extended with the use of a scripting language such as we used for the skip questioning. Using the zinc administration question logic above, if question Z301 (just a question abbreviation code) is Yes, then skip to question Z306. If the mother answers No, then hide all following questions and advance the PDA screen to question Z310. The script that we used follows:

if answer == Y then
goto [Z306] {zinc administration question series}
else {meaning the answer to question Z301 is “No”}
goto [Z310] {“are you unaware of the zinc supplement available to your baby from the health worker?”}
endif

The following PDA screen imqges show how this works:

If answer is Yes



Then the PDA screen advances to:



On the other hand, if the answer is No:



Then the PDA screen automatically advances to the Title screen of the next section:



If the mother can answer a certain question in more than two ways, then we use a common script form called Switch Case. This allows for multiple answers to a question controlling the PDA user to the relevant screen.

SWITCH answer
CASE "1" {“yes, I give my baby the zinc supplement”}
goto [FS801]
CASE "2" {“no, I have received the zinc supplement, but have never given it to my baby”}
goto [FS504]
CASE "8" {“I am not sure, I have never heard of the zinc supplement”}
goto [FS504]
ENDSWITCH

After the interviews, we assembled where I asked Zanna, Bamadio and Soro how it went. I noted that all heads nodded up and down in the affirmative, then changed to shaking side to side when I asked if there were any problems. For them, they mostly were reporting to me on the technological aspect of using the PDA’s. For my part, I am most interested at this point in the usability by the interviewer and acceptability by the mother. The latter, can often be overwhelmed by the gaze of the interviewer on the small device, and not the usual clipboard and shuffling of paper forms. Here, I noted that the mothers would turn their head away from the interviewer in a disaffected gaze, listen to the question, and then answer with the head still turned. But, after the answer was given, often the mother then would look towards the interviewer to watch the entering of the answer on the PDA.



We then traveled a short distance to the village of Diambala. Here, Bamadio let me know that we needed to first visit the village chief to inform him of the reason of our visit and to obtain permission. I believe that my CTO had to do the same thing and observe correct protocol on his recent visit with Princess Anne in Great Britain. It is the same at any level…



The chief received us graciously, directing chairs to be provided as we reclined on a platform outside of his house. I listened to speeches being traded, then, with obvious permission of the chief, we arose to conduct our interviews. I was happy that I did not need to give a speech, which, from my experience, is often the case with a foreign visitor.



After our return to the Save the Children office in Bougouni, we downloaded the data in about three seconds (the rule is, type it once, and never type it again!). We found all records, with each person interviewing 2 to 3 mothers in each of the two villages. We really did not need to spend more time. Yes, that is me with a sweet potato that was given as a gift to me by a villager.



After the intervening weekend, we will travel to neighboring Guinea to conduct PDA tests at the Save the Children office there.