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.
Of course there's the usual insanity of large-scale trainings, since we progress at about the speed of the slowest person. But this training has been quite a bit different from ones I led in college or at my last job, because it's in rural India.
For example, 96 of the 148 people at our training have the last name "Kumar." Most names carry some caste affiliation, and Kumar is one of the names which doesn't, so a lot of people have taken the last name Kumar (especially if they're lower caste but not necessarily). That would be one thing if first names were fairly unique, but names are often carried through families, so there's a lot of overlap. This means that we need to distinguish between Rajesh Kumar, Rajesh Kumar Singh, Rajesh Ranjan Kumar and Rajesh Kumar Nandan. And also between the three Dhananjay Kumars, two Soni Kumaris, two Sushil Kumars, etc. I wish I were joking. I've taken to using their mobile numbers as identification (insta serial code), but once we've finalized the team and formally hired people, we'll assign them codes to make things a little simpler.
And, since we're running a training in rural India, I can't run to Kinko's at 3am for last-minute printing. We have a printer, but day before yesterday morning (the first day of training here in Behea), I went to print the agenda before the start of training and smoke poured out of the printer. Ok, so I exaggerated a bit in the title of the post, but it wasn't some little wisp of smoke, it was really serious dark gray stuff and Nikhil got a really terrible shock at the same time. Needless to say it's no longer functional, and there was a bit of "ok, what now?" because our training was scheduled to start in an hour and we had just lost our ability to distribute materials. Thank goodness nothing fazes me here anymore.
We're not at a complete loss - there is a "printer" here in Behea, by which I mean there's a dude who owns one of those little printers companies give you for free when you buy a new laptop. And there are always a dozen or more guys surrounding him trying to use it (remember that most bureaucratic institutions here require multiple hard copies of everything). So we print one copy of what we need and then cross the street to the photocopy guy where he churns out our copies (why doesn't he invest in a printer since there's clearly high demand? Such questions are fated to forever go unanswered). But neither shop opens before 9:30 or 10, they close before 6 , and yesterday they were closed because it's Tuesday. Apparently Tuesday is official no-printing day.
Yesterday had an additional twist when our Field Coordinator's mobile phone went missing, almost certainly stolen, and we decided to crack down to indicate how serious we are about stealing. We had a talk with the group, and when that unsurprisingly didn't go anywhere, we decided to search their bags and pat down the trainees. I felt very uncomfortable about this, but I realized that's partially an American thing - US airports only recently started doing patdowns and everyone threw a hissy fit, but here it's very standard and it isn't perceived as a violation like patdowns are in the US (as long as women, not men, do patdowns on women). Unfortunately, the cell phone still hasn't been found.
I guarantee you that I can handle any training in the US after this one, and we still have about two weeks of training ahead of us… let's see what other adventures are in store.
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