Shruti's Wedding

A lot has happened in the last few days! I left Behea last Sunday, packed up, sold all our stuff, and moved out of Patna with Jeff on Thursday, spent two-ish days in Allahabad for Shruti's wedding, and now we're in the Delhi office for the last few hours before we board our flight to the US! We're going to write proper final posts when we're back home, but for now, a quick description of Shruti's wedding.

Living in Behea

Now that I'm about to leave, I'm finally having the hard-core field RA experience that I imagined I would have the whole time here. A few days a week for the past few months, and continuously for the past two and a half weeks, I've been living in Behea (except for a very pleasant 12 hour jaunt to Patna and back with McManus). As I may have mentioned before, Behea's a small town bisected by a railway line and a major road that cuts through the district, so it's a bit more bustling than neighboring towns.

Eating in Behea, LOTR-style

The food for the field staff is arranged by a survey company we've hired to take care of logistics. It's really good, if monotonous, and they're incredibly eager to serve "Madam" (yeah, that's me). We had originally arranged for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but it turns out that the full meal plan at no additional cost is this:

Exploding Printers and 100 Kumars

For our health project, we've recruited over a hundred people to collect the various different types of data we're interested in. In order to train all these people, we've split our training into 5 different phases. Basically, it's mostly organized madness. And because some of the trainees need to go to clinics in Patna to practice, 1/3 of our team is in Patna and the remaining 2/3 is here in Behea, 3 hours away.

Anger Management

Or at least anger organization, into a neat little list of the things that make me want to explode:

Bon Voyage, Lalu!

Our little pup arrived last night in Sarasota, Florida, where he'll spend the best summer of his life - playing with Jeff's family's other two dogs, romping in their yard, going to the doggy beach and doggy park, basically heaven. Jeff's parents have very generously agreed to take care of him until we're settled in Boston at the end of the summer.

Arbitrary

Recently my staff had to survey in a village called Gahmar, which according to locals has the distinction of being "the largest village in Asia." I was surprised to find that this claim was corroborated by Wikipedia. I'd highly suggest reading through this very informative and "off course" well-articulated article. But I'm not sure that I find the claim very meaningful. It looks like the locals decided to clump 23 villages together and call it one name, or replace the word "town" with "village", in order to earn the distinction of being the largest village in Asia. I also don't know if I believe Wikipedia's estimate of 2 lakh residents, since the Census data that I am using for sampling cites a number 90% lower for the village's population. (Off course, the Census data is 10 years old, but this would imply a birth rate that is high even for rural India). Finally, I went down to the area and found that no one was saying the "very famous saying" that is quoted in the article.

गाजीपुर (Ghazipur)

I surprised Jeff last weekend by showing up in Ghazipur, Uttar Pradesh, where he is running a voter survey (described in more detail in a previous post). Ghazipur is around a 5-6 hour drive from Patna, but the town where my project is based (Behea) is on the edge of Bihar and mid-way between Patna and Ghazipur, so it actually didn't take too long.

DE Ops: मुन्ता, नही मुत्रा

Jeff has been living in Ghazipur, Uttar Pradesh, running his survey. He came back for a few days for Holi and setting up Data Entry, but before he came back, I was helping oversee some preliminary data entry for him. Basically, we hired some temporary workers (Data Entry Operators - DEOs) to read names off a government website and type them in Hindi in Excel (they can't be copied and pasted, unfortunately). This means learning to use the really nifty English-phonetic Hindi font that we use, which is really straightforward except for some weird conjunct characters.

Hey! Where's MY Rs 1200!?

Recently, I was in a village south of Ghazipur when I stopped to eat lunch with a survey monitor at a middle school. The headmaster of the school was very excited to meet an American - he said that since he would never go there in his life, this was his one opportunity to learn what life was like over there. So, with pen and paper in hand, he interviewed me (through a translator):

होली! The Festival of Colors

Yesterday was the much-awaited climax of Holi: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holi. Jeff was in Uttar Pradesh, India for Holi last year, so he already experienced the craziness of the Festival of Colors:

Jeff in UP in 2010:

Grandma likes coffee but she doesn't like tea

A lot of unfair things are said about Bihar. But a lot of fair things are unsaid. This is most unfortunate, since those fair but unsaid things usually rhyme. An example? "The tea in Bihar is often sub-par."

Banana (बनाना, नही केला)

We hired our first female supervisor this week (Mala, माला), and besides the fact that it's great to start having female field staff, she's been an additional blessing for an unexpected reason: she doesn't speak English. Plenty of our supervisors and surveyors don't speak English, but she is on a mission to teach me Hindi, so I'm learning fast.

Nimbu!

Wonderful news to share! The Bihar Voters Field Manager Girish and his wife Data Entry Operator Neetu just had a baby! We've all been in suspense for several weeks, and we're really excited that it was a healthy delivery and everyone's doing great. I'll have a follow up post in 5 days when we all throw a big party.

A mediocre badass

The last two days have been a series of humbling lessons in the fact that a.) I'm not as much of a badass as I think I am and b.) that I'm not a complete wimp either.

Attention Bihar bus drivers: 1 person < 4 samosas

The last few days I've been piloting the survey instrument around Patna to figure out the best way to phrase certain questions and the best way to select respondents. Yesterday the team, which is growing very quickly, went to Punpun block about 25-30km south of Patna to test the questionnaire in a more rural and isolated environment. This area is well known for making jokejokes of its village names. Some common examples: Where do you go to get cow products? Dehri village. Where do you go to get Jewish holiday fixtures? Manora village.

Four hours on Sunday afternoon, with doors open

Swatties and former Swatties will appreciate this piece:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,938483,00.html

I think most of us would agree that it is a fair portrayal of our alma mater. In fact, given the article's progressive views on diversity and gender equality, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the author is a former Swattie.

Surveying, and I'm not talking about the ACSM

I am going to start surveying soon*. The past few months have been mostly in-office data work, so the prospect of being in the field** is exciting, nerve-wracking, and exhausting. Exciting because it means buzzing down dirt roads in the chill of the early morning on the back of a bike, searching the rustic scenery for idle surveyors. Nerve-wracking because it means I will be managing ten times more people than I am now and mistakes are costly - whereas I can always tweak and re-run a .do file if I mess up a regression specification the first time, I can't  re-run a $30,000 three-month survey if I forget to tell my surveyors that they HAVE to stick to the pre-selected randomized list of respondents or face eternal damnation. Exhausting because it's exciting and nerve-wracking and all-consuming. I'm going to miss my boys -  Vincent Chase, Jonathan Ames, Dexter, and the rest of the crew - while I'm away. Oh yeah, and Virginia, I'll miss her too.

Being Adminator

Like Weaver, I try to make my posts about non-work things, since a good chunk of what I do is interesting to me but would make for a horrendously boring blog post (e.g. creating the perfect staff payment tracker). However, since McManus and I don't have a lot going on in our lives besides work (and people who aren't as in love with dogs may want a change of pace), I'm going to give an update on my work life.

Lalu's new best friend: "Money"

Two of our JPAL colleagues, Seema and Nikhil, just adopted a feisty little street puppy that they've named Mani Pandey (and Jeff's nicknamed him "Money," since that's what the pronunciation in Hindi sounds like, which has spawned spin-offs like "Paisa Puppy" and "Rupee Runt"). And Seema's started bringing him to the office. So now, paradoxically, we're actually able to get more work done because the puppies play furiously for 15 minutes and then collapse in exhaustion for 2-3 hours. No words can describe how hysterically adorable it is.

Trekking in Nepal

In the midst of all the craziness of winter, we appear to have forgotten to actually post about the hiking portion of our trip in Nepal in November. In short, the trip was beautiful, and rather than give you a windy narrative full of humorous anecdotes, I'll just cut straight to the pictures, since that's the best part anyway; if we ever find some spare time on our hands, we might just post some of our favorite stories...

Dog Show Champion

Despite not being fully healed, Lalu rocked the Patna Dog Show on Sunday. Yes, you heard me correctly. A dog show is something I would never consider participating in in the US, since everyone would be all snooty about breeds and behavior and such. But here in Patna, it was a riot.

Ghost Story

I went with Shruti to buy chicken today for the pup. We think he is a pharaoh hound mix, in no small part because he gets treated like a little god-puppy come to earth.

Turns out I'm not afraid of poop

In general, I find feces to be quite disgusting. I think this is a normal attitude and quite conducive to good hygiene practices. However, I used to be concerned that when I have children, I’ll be too grossed out to do essential tasks like change diapers. Turns out I have nothing to worry about, since Lalu has urinated and defecated on me every few hours since I returned from Delhi night before last, and it hasn’t fazed me too much.

Somkin' Joe's

This is one of the many reasons why we prefer Smokin' Joe's over Dominoes (there are only two pizza places in Patna):

The Dangers of Cold

The schools here in Bihar were supposed to reopen today after a week of vacation. However,  as our ever-enjoyable Times of India reports, "the biting cold has forced the government to extend closure of all public and private schools across the state till January 9." And what horrifying temperatures have prompted this closure? The forecast mentioned is a high of 60F, low of 44F. Don't you wish your governor declared an extra week of vacation across the whole state when the temperature dipped below 50F?