Fieldwork with "Lulu"

You may be wondering what Jeff and I have been up to during this long spell between blog posts. Have they been teaching their pup to be a model canine citizen? Have they been hanging out in coffee shops in Patna, or strolling through the tourist sites? Or have they been busting their butts for JPAL, working long, exhausting hours, just as if they were, what's the term, "field RAs"?

Things have gotten a bit calmer in the last few days, which is a relief, so I'll tell you a bit about what it's like to bring Lalu into the field with us. First things first: the good Swattie in me cringes at the problematic use of the term "the field," which is bandied about by all the RAs (and probably other people doing work in development econ, but I haven't met many of them yet). Basically, if you're snug in the US offices, "the field" means "that foreign country where we do our work." And if you're based in the Patna "field" office, the term "the field" refers to the wide expanse of villages that extends throughout Bihar, beginning on the outskirts of Patna, where we run around asking people questions. Just to get our terminology straight.

Last week, we visited several villages to test out whether it would be logistically feasible to distribute a gazillion newspapers to villagers in a particular region (there's a much more technical and nuanced explanation, but that's not the interesting part of the story). The night before we were going to set out for a full day of travel, Jeff and I realized a small snag: we have a tiny puppy, who certainly couldn't handle being left all by himself all day, and all of our colleagues were off doing fieldwork of their own and thus unable to babysit him. So I swung by the Dog Hospital and bought a small plastic crate that he just barely fits in, which we stuck under the driver's seat of the car we'd hired to drive us around, and we were off!

Now, I know full well that raising a puppy and raising a child are vastly different endeavors, but from my few weeks of experience with Lalu so far (and my years of babysitting human children), there do seem to be some key themes, the most significant of which is this: the little tykes need CONSTANT supervision. So when I decided to take our Patna street dog out into the countryside (New sights! New smells!), I didn't really take into consideration that rather than supervising our volunteers and monitors, I would be devoting the vast majority of my attention to keeping him from accidentally getting bit by a goat or kicked by a curious toddler.

The villagers are already shocked to see an American (woman!) visiting them, but the double whammy of an American woman carrying a Patna street dog on a leash is really just too much for them to handle. In the first village we visited, I was followed by a crowd of (literally) over 50 children, plus the various adults who hovered on the edges, pretending not to be interested. I eventually realized that although it was quite frustrating to not be able to consistently oversee my field staff (don't worry, I was accompanied by two Project Assistants and one Field Manager who made sure everyone was doing what they were supposed to be doing), one unexpected side benefit is that most of the interactions between our staff and the villagers were conducted in much more privacy than is usual, because nearly everyone in the village was gawking at me, rather than crowding around the interviewee.

So when we were in villages, I tried to convince the extremely shy children to pet him (no takers, although there was a flurry of giggling every time I invited them to come pet him, so it was almost like they were playing with him). And when we were on the fringes of a village or travelling between them, I tried to introduce Lalu to goats, which are more common than dogs in the villages.  Unfortunately, although Lalu danced around and eagerly tried to convince the goats to play, they wouldn't have any of it, and ran away from him like he had the plague.

Over the course of two days of field work with Lalu in tow, we've discovered an unanticipated benefit of having the little plastic crate, besides the fact that he stays put and doesn't freak out the drivers. He doesn't seem to really understand what a car is, or that if he were allowed to sit on the seat, he could stick his nose out the window and get high off the sheer volume of new smells assaulting his senses. So in Jeff's words, Lalu loves getting into his magical portal that leads to a new place every time he emerges from it! And he runs right into it whenever presented with the option, eagerly awaiting the new set of smells he'll encounter when the door opens again.

Eventually, he'll get to the point where he doesn't spaz out with excitement every time he enters a new village, requiring me to keep an extremely sharp eye on him at all times. And eventually he'll understand the function and features of a car. But for now, we seem to be having a good time of it, and the villagers sure are getting a kick out of us.

*Note: as indicated by the title, the politically sensitive nature of our pup's name, especially since we're doing work related to the elections, means that our little guy has a dual identity: at home, he is "Lalu," but in all public spaces, he is "Lulu." As you can imagine, this causes him no end of confusion, but hopefully when the elections are behind us, we'll be able to call him by his real name everywhere.