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.