April Fool's Day, WASH Edition

So it turns out that Kenyans love a good April Fool's joke as much as anyone. On Friday, the front page of the Daily Nation, Kenya's largest newspaper, ran an article suggesting that a new nuclear power plant was in the works for Kenya, which would supply all of the country's power at such a cheap rate that some industries wouldn't even have to pay for it, and the whole enterprise would only set the country back 950 Billion Kenyan shillings (about 12 Billion US Dollars). If only.

Anyway, not wanting to miss out on the fun, I decided this would be a great chance to pull something over on my team, who are all young and humorous and good sports about all the other strange things I ask them to do (like cross-dressing, for instance. Remind me to come back to that.). As you might expect of a project that has sanitation as one of its primary interests, we spend a lot of time talking about latrines and diarrhea and exchanging other toilet-related pleasantries. We've had our field officers inspect latrines, rating the smell and the amount of flies and telling us whether or not a child would want to use this latrine (hint: no.). We've had them ask people a lot of questions about latrine construction, maintenance, and usage. I think they pretty much expect us to put them in the most awkward, ridiculous situations possible at this point, but they've never backed down from an assignment. Yet.

So naturally, last Friday, I set out to find out just how ridiculous things could get before they finally said "Seriously Andrew, ain't gonna happen." What follows is the field assignment I handed out that morning, with the additional information that we were going to be doing this on Monday and I would be coming back for their feedback in a couple of hours. (For clarification, PLUM refers to Personal Latrine Use Monitor, an infrared sensor we use to track patterns of latrine usage. Soooo yeah, we're pretty creepy.)

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WASH Team – Latrine Assignment

April 1, 2011

Objectives: Now that we have started to use the PLUM more and are asking more questions about what we can do to get people to use the latrine more often, it’s time to put our new qualitative research skills to work on learning more about people’s behavior when using latrine. In order to interpret our PLUM data properly, we need to know how long people are taking in the latrine, and in order to determine the suitability of slabs or other latrine improvements, we need to know how people feel about their latrine experience in general.

Assignment: This assignment will be a combination of a structured observation and in-depth interview, which will take place near the latrines of respondents. You will sit near the latrine with your survey, a stopwatch, and a camera, and record/ask the following:

Before the respondent enters the latrine, you will ask for their informed consent to ask some questions and take their photo. If they consent, take a “before” photo for our records, and start the stopwatch as soon as they enter the latrine.

While the respondent is in the latrine, keep the stopwatch running. At 30-second intervals, you should ask the respondent how things are going and how they would describe their latrine experience at that point. Probe for details (smell, comfort, etc.)

When the respondent exits the latrine, stop the stopwatch and announce the time to the respondent. Ask them how their experience was, what they liked and disliked about it, what they would do differently if they could do it again, how they felt about their time, and how it compared to other latrine experiences they have had in the past. Take an “after” photo for our records.

We think that this opportunity to get open-ended feedback while people are in the process of using the latrine will provide some really valuable information for us. With your new qualitative methods training, you should now be comfortable probing and following up on what respondents say to dig deeper and get at what’s really going on beneath the surface.

Next step: participant observation!

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They bought it.

When I came back with Carson about half an hour later, they were in the middle of arguing over who would have to be the first ones to try it out in the field. They were also brimming with thoughtful questions for Carson and me. We were brimming with something else, which made it hard to keep a straight face.

"What is the purpose of taking their picture?" (Me: Um, you know, a picture is worth a thousand words, so we should get, uh, a lot of information about their attitude towards their, you know, latrine experience and stuff.)

"But what if they are very pressed for time and they are even running to the latrine, how will we take their picture?" (Carson: You just have to take an action shot. If we look at the picture later and just see this blur coming toward the latrine, that will still tell us a lot.)

"And sitting by the latrine, one is likely to encounter some unpleasant smell and maybe even germs. How will we avoid these?" (Carson: We'll be giving you nose plugs, so no problem.)

"But many respondents won't like us to sit next to their latrine for fear that we might see inside." (Me: Yes. That's why you will also have blindfolds.)

"But the respondents will think that we can still see through the blindfold." (Carson: That's why the respondent will tie the blindfold on for you.)

"And now, you are saying that we should be asking the respondents about their experience every thirty seconds. Many times people will be embarrassed, they will not want to speak." (Carson: Exactly. But you can still hear.)

This went on for an unbelievable amount of time. I don't think I've ever seen a group of people more relieved than when we finally told them it was a joke. And they weren't the only ones--all over the office, the other project managers all told their teams that half of them had to come work for WASH that day because we needed lots of people for this assignment, and they had to come up with their own method of choosing the unlucky team members. I heard everything being tried from making the least senior field officers do it to drawing straws to a Kenyan gambling method involving tossed beans and a lot of noise.

And then our country director tried to convince us that there was this new dress code and we all had to wear official IPA attire every day, and no one really cared.