Kenya: It's (Not) All about Data

I feel as though I have blinked and a week has gone by.

This was the week when being perpetually dirty, sleeping under a bug net, and responding to the dinner bell like Pavlov's dog all became as normal as life at home. I have had a few dreams about shopping malls and grocery stores that wake me up in a panic. Being in rural Kenya and so far away from all of that over-availability and (relative to here) incredible wealth definitely makes it seem eons away. But, that will probably be the topic of an entirely separate blog post.

For now, it's all about data.

This past week we spent a lot of time "in the field." This means, as I alluded to previously, that we split into randomly assigned partners and traveled around all day with our translators and any guides who picked us up along the way to find mamas with children less than five to answer the questions in our survey. They were our target audience because here, women are the primary users of the health care system and caretakers of children, who fall sick quite often. We have an eleven page survey that takes about forty minutes to complete, including translating and back translating questions and answers. There are lots of check boxes and "why's" and some rather intrusive questions about, ahem, waste facilities (or lack thereof).

Nonetheless, we were welcomed to their finest seats and benches, ogled by the children who shamelessly crawled all over us, offered cups of chai we had to find creative ways to graciously turn down, and some of us were even given homemade jewelry by women particularly happy with our efforts. And at some point, the check boxes became secondary.

By that I don't mean that we have been working less hard. Quite the opposite. I mean, similar to the shift I've felt in this life becoming more normal than when I first arrived, we have all felt a shift from importance of checking off the right box to improving conditions for people here. Throughout this week, it became less about decreasing the country's rate of mortality among children and more about making sure that little girl we saw, delirious with malaria, gets what she needs to feel better and go to school. It became more about and making sure that the pregnant mother goes to her antenatal visits to keep herself healthy and less about decreasing the maternal mortality rate.

So, I guess really, it's not all about data. It's about people.