A huge part of my job here in Kenya is overseeing field work for my team. When everything goes according to plan, this involves coordinating the delivery of various interventions, administering surveys, conducting focus groups, and leading community meetings in the villages where we work. The percentage of time that everything goes according to plan is probably something like negative 83% (the negative is for all those times when the plan finds an astonishingly high number of ways to go wrong, or when the back-up plan and damage control plans also crash and burn). The end result is that very often I am really just a glorified fire extinguisher.
So to help you get a bit of a feel for my job, I present to you six of the most entertaining, head-scratching, face-palming, and occasionally frightening fiascoes that have beset my team these past few months. As a fun little exercise, I have also left them without resolution, so you can play along at home and come up with your own responses.
Three of these stories have happened within the past week. All of them are 100% true. They are also 26% frustrating, 74% silly, and 1,000,000% ridiculous:
Scenario A: One morning, just after shooing your team out the door like a hen-pecked parent, you return to your office to enjoy a nice cup of tea and set about some other business, only to find your team traipsing back in through the door five minutes later, a chorus of car horns ringing from the yard behind them. The Busia Police, it appears, having not yet received their pay for the previous month, have decided to recoup their losses by declaring today "Vehicle Inspection Day!" and charging fees for towing and processing the impounded vehicles. The rules are pretty simple: Vehicle doesn't have a valid insurance sticker? Impound! Vehicle does have a valid insurance sticker but it looks slightly sun-bleached? Impound! One of the rear seatbelts doesn't buckle? Impound! Vehicle has absolutely nothing wrong with it but "looks like it might be stolen"? Impound! You now have no field vehicles, an entire field team with no activities for the day, and a very stubborn police force on your hands. Go.
Scenario B: You are starting a new child health pilot in a village to look at how you can help mamas keep their compounds more sanitary. You begin by holding a community meeting and focus group, followed by a baseline survey among a few selected respondents. Everything goes spectacularly well on the first visit: people are warm, receptive, and thankful for the fact that you are working in their community. When your team returns, however, they are met with a very different response: the villagers are cold, hostile, and suspicious. They drive your team members away, accusing them of (what else?) wanting to steal the blood of the village's children. As it turns out, another NGO had also been doing some child health work in the area, in a neighboring village. As part of their project, they had taken some blood samples--maybe to test for malaria, HIV, other diseases, who knows--but hadn't yet returned to follow up or announce the results. Naturally, the neighboring village assumed that the NGO had really only been after the blood all along and that the whole "child health" story was just a front, and they quickly begin to spread the word to their neighbors to be suspicious of any outside group that comes in asking about the health of their children. The fact that your team arrived on its first visit in a red car obviously doesn't help anything (red, I don't think I need to remind you, is the color of cherries. Also blood, which may be more relevant here). You now have a whole village that thinks IPA is a blood-sucking agency of the devil. Go.
Scenario C: While in the field, team members often recruit a community member to guide them around to the various compounds they need to visit. In most cases, the village elder selects upstanding residents of the village to carry out this task. In others, the guides are of a less reputable constitution. One day, you receive a call from one of your field officers informing you that her guide, a rather suspicious-smelling individual, has been arrested on charges of assault, and that, in the long-standing Kenyan tradition of "guilty by association until proven innocent (or until exonerated by that crisp new 200 shilling note that somehow found its way into the policeman's pocket)", the police have also levied accusations against her and demanded to search her things. She now has no guide to get her back to the rest of the team and a very suspicious policeman on her back. Go.
Scenario D: You are traveling with your team to an area known for its steep terrain, poor roads, and constant rain, the kind of place that eats your normal field vehicles as a pre-breakfast snack. To keep your team safe and on track, you enlist the services of a driver who claims to have a 4x4 vehicle that can accommodate all your needs. Once you arrive at your destination, it quickly becomes apparent that your driver has a bit of an honesty problem when, after fishtailing your way up a muddy slope, you abruptly find your vehicle facing the opposite direction of the one you are trying to travel. When some friendly police officers stop by to help push you out of the mud, you discover that your driver's claims about having proper insurance for his vehicle were also somewhat exaggerated. You are now on a muddy hill in the middle of nowhere with no proper mode of transportation back to town and your only ride about to be impounded by the police. Go.
Scenario E: While conducting a survey with a mama in a rural village somewhere, one of your field officers is suddenly confronted by the woman's husband, who has returned home in the middle of the day, completely drunk, and has decided that your field officer's whole "Can I ask you a few questions about hygiene in your compound and community?" routine, with its fancy "clipboards" and "surveys", is really just an elaborate strategy to seduce his wife. His reaction is less than peaceful. Your field officer manages to get away, but the team is wary of returning to this particular compound or even village again. Go.
Scenario F: While on a survey trip that requires your team to camp for a week in a town a few hours from Busia, your field officers return to their guest house from the day's work to the sound of gunshots in a back alley (which is a very rare occurrence in Western Kenya--gun violence is virtually non-existent here). When the boys in blue come to investigate, the locals helpfully volunteer the information that your team has been out scouting homes in the community all day, clearly indicating that they are a crack team of violent home robbers casing out their next victims and happened to carelessly give themselves away with some casual gun-play. Your entire team is immediately arrested and held overnight in the local prison. The next day, the local prosecutor insists on questioning each team member individually for several hours, making it impossible for you to bail them out. Go.
My bosses are coming to Kenya next week and I have a lot to do to prepare for their arrival, so you'll have plenty of time to come up with and submit your own creative strategies for restoring sanity in each of these situations. Except Scenario F. If you have a potential solution to Scenario F, you should forward it immediately to ahoekzema@poverty-action.org. Like, now. Please.
My own responses (not to be confused with "correct responses") will be coming soon.
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