Hello,

I’ve returned to Davis, California, with all of my research data ready to be entered into the computer and analyzed. In all, I was in Tanzania for about seven weeks.

After getting settled in Iringa, I had some time to speak with the staff at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS ) office and others about my research, who gave me advice regarding my questionnaires. By luck, I ran into my Swahili teacher from when I was in Peace Corps training six years ago, who agreed to help me with translating the questionnaires.

To get a general picture of chicken and egg production, marketing and consumption, I, first conducted key informant interviews in the three project and three control villages. To do these interviews, I went to each of the villages with Msago, WCS’s Community Liaison, and interviewed the village Chairmen, Village Executive Officers, group leaders, head teachers, health attendants and women in leadership roles. Some interviews took place in village offices, some in or outside of people’s homes while sitting on small, wooden stools or bricks, and some took place in a round, grass-roofed structure used for drinking the locally-made alcoholic beverages. There were often curious children around, playing and stealing a glimpse of what we were doing.

Next, I made logistical plans for conducting at least 40 household interviews in each of the six villages. I hired eight interviewers and brought them to a camp near Ruaha National Park for two days of training in conducting interviews. When I was satisfied with their understanding of the questions and after we had practiced the interviews a few times, we loaded the food we needed, bedding, and ten people into Msago’s truck for a weeklong interview “venture.” The ten of us spent the next seven days and six nights in the villages conducting interviews. In the first three villages, we slept in an unused house that belonged to a village association, which had only one mosquito net and rat scat everywhere. In the last three villages, we stayed in a small, well-kept guesthouse. We bought firewood in the villages, and hired a woman to prepare food for us each day.

For the most part, each day Msago and I, after deciding with the village leaders which interviewer would go to which sub-village, drove between the various sub-villages within a village, dropping off and picking up the interviewers. Each village has between three and nine sub-villages. The interviewers conducted about five or six interviews each, per day. The days were hot and dry, even though it was the middle of the rainy season, and the interviewers did a great job and never complained.

The first day of interviews was probably the hardest, as we were figuring out how to catch people at home, and because there was a funeral. To help the family of the deceased, we assisted in transporting the corpse to the gravesite in our truck, and let the immediate family members ride with us. The women in the back seat were sorrowfully wailing on the way, both over and back. After the burial, people returned home and we continued with our interviews.

In the evenings, Msago continued with his work for WCS, by showing educational videos on wildlife living in nearby Ruaha National Park, in each of the villages. To show the video, he wired a projector and DVD player up to his truck for electricity. Each evening, the ten of us piled into his truck and drove through the sub-villages of one of the villages, blasting popular Tanzanian dance music and making announcements on our microphone that we would be showing a film in the village that night. This, of course, got screams of glee from the children, who swiftly stopped what they were doing and began running after us and dancing. We also took the opportunity to announce to the village that the next day we would be doing interviews. This announcement turned out to benefit us, in that people would wait for us to interview them before heading off to their fields in the morning. The villagers, especially the children, thoroughly enjoyed the videos and probably would have watched them until the middle of the night, if we hadn’t stopped the show. We often didn’t get back to our beds until 1 AM, and then got up at 6 AM each morning, with the first rooster call.

The household interview “mission” was one of my favorite weeks in Tanzania. It was full of hard, long, hot working days of interviewing and driving, but I had the chance to be with a great group of young and lively interviewers and Msago, a gentle, respected and fun-loving man. I got to sit and talk with traditional Maasai men and women at their homes, to drive up and down dirt roads that barely seem drivable, and to visit the gravesite memorial of Chief Mkwawa, the famous leader of the Hehe people. And we only had to push the truck out of a mud pit one time!

Before leaving Tanzania, I got to make a quick visit to the village where I lived for two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer, four years ago. This was a special treat to spend time with my friends there, and to see how the children have grown.

Now, back in Davis, I will be using the information I collected to write my thesis – A Social Impact Assessment of a Chicken Newcastle Disease Vaccination Program on Rural Farmers in Iringa Region, Tanzania. A GL-CRSP Jim Ellis Research Brief will be published afterwards, with a description of the study, results, and practical implications.

Best,

Danielle

For more on Danielle's project please visit the GLCRSP Avian Flu School project (AFS), an international train-the-trainer course covering the essential skills for prevention and detection of and response to an H5N1 HPAI outbreak, and implementing a village-level Newcastle Disease and Avian Flu Control Project throughout West and East Africa.