Coffee and surveys

May 13, 2011

My kitchen turned into something resembling a coffee shop most nights this week, although I’m the only one who drinks coffee at night. Filomena is here, of course, but other local kids have been stopping by. I sit at my table with my computer and Willie Nelson or ZZ Top playing in the background, while the kids (Filomena, her brother - Santo Juel, Ernesto, Erlin, etc.) sit at another table playing cards or reading the Spanish children’s stories I downloaded to my iPad. I tried to buy actual children’s books in La Esperanza but so far all I can find is religious books and really low level story books. I found Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tales in Spanish on amazon.com and Filomena has been blowing through them.

I appreciate having them around. Otherwise the three nights I spent revising my survey software would have been kind of lonely and depressing. I’m using a cool program called FileMaker Pro (yes, I said cool – I’m a nerd). It’s database software that has an iPad version, so I can just use the iPad in the field. The iPad has been great. It’s light, has a long battery life, and, in an otterbox, it’s way more durable (and sanitizable) than my computer. My original survey design worked, but I spent the last few nights learning how to use auto-complete commands to fill in questions based on previous responses. It worked really well today and made things go much faster than Wednesday.

I needed the surveys to go a little faster. In Las Mercedes, I spent five or six hours on 17 surveys. Today I spent five hours on 30 surveys. Unfortunately, there were still 15-20 kids that I hadn’t seen when the truck came to get me. It just takes longer when I have to go house to house. It’s less exhausting in some ways because I get a break between families, but I’m realizing that I might need two days per community. It’s also a problem that I can’t stay in the communities as long as I want. I would have stayed today until I saw all of the children, and I probably could have done it before dinner-time. I suppose I should have been more persistent about collecting surveys these last two weeks. Now I’m going to really have to squeeze things in if I want to spend the last two weeks passing out dental hygiene supplies. I guess I’ll look around some more this weekend for a motorcycle. If I could just stay in the communities a little longer I could do a community per day… but it still doesn’t seem worth it to go back to Tegucigalpa.

I suppose the other answer is to spend less time on educating, or not see all of the kids. I don’t like either of those choices. I have a stuffed fish with teeth that helps me educate the kids. Dr. Keels, a dentist in Durham who has been working with me, gave it to me. She has tons of similar stuffed animals at her pediatric dentistry office. The fish has a matching oversized toothbrush. Most of the kids love the fish, but some of the younger ones look terrorized when I take a large fish with a full smile out of my bag. The fish is a puppet so I make the fish open its mouth and coach the kids on their brushing technique. I usually wrap things up by making the fish bite at the kid, which always gets a good reaction. Most of the kids tell me they brush their teeth, but they still have what looks like a few days of food on their teeth. I think the education part is pretty crucial, and if I don’t do it I feel like I’m taking their time without giving much back.

I feel similarly about seeing all of the kids, especially if they know I saw most of the rest of the kids in the community. I know part of the benefit of the survey is just giving them the attention, and it seems unfair if some of the kids are seen and others aren’t. It also causes some sampling problems for my survey if I don’t see everyone and my sample isn’t random. I suppose in the end I will either see them all or run out of time. I will at least do my best to see them all.