Delayed Field Work

I'd have to say that I'm a people watcher. I like to see how people work, especially in situations where I can see how culture influences actions.
We were told to meet at 7:45am to leave for the field. So, at 7:45 all 15 of us show up. But there's a problem. Nobody from the Food for the Hungry office here in Gitarama had the print out of questions for the survey. Problem. But you'd think there would be an easy solution, like print them, right? Wrong. The printer is out of ink. Oh but wait, the questions aren't done yet anyway. So 5 Rwandan staff members watch one man's computer screen. Not helping. Just watching. (by now it's been about 9). Okay so the questions are done. Now let's take them to the print store. Oh wait. They're in the wrong format to print. Fix that. Get them to the print store. But not so easy. More problems. Okay finally they are printed. It's now 3 hours after we planned to depart. Anyhow, we got out. It all worked. And Africa will always be Africa and Africa time will never equal American time.

Eventually we got to our field site which is wayyy off the main road. As soon as we arrived we caught the attention of everyone (it's an extremely small village where they are not used to white people). So we began the interview process. As the day progressed more and more people came to watch. By our last interview we probably had 40 people pushing their way to the front to watch the process. It was quite fun. And I got to hold some fabulously cute children. Have I mentioned how much I love the kids here??

Tomorrow we will do more interviews and visit them in their homes. I'll get some pictures to put up here.