Getting alternatingly insanely stressed and a strong feeling of satisfaction in my work

I can’t believe that it is already the 14th of September! The last few weeks are pretty much a complete blur, and this post will hopefully shed a little more light on what I’m actually doing here. If I hadn’t explained it before to you, I’m working as a research associate for professors who are doing research in urban slums in Delhi (and with the homeless, though that stage won’t begin until January or so). The project has a crazy number of different components, but the one that we’re focusing on now is a survey of residents of urban slums in order to learn more about their lives and needs.

This is pretty awesome, because it basically means that I get to spend a lot of time hanging out in slums (“the field”) and listening to people’s life stories. I had previously been sitting in an office and working with data or writing grants, which is nice, but not quite as educational or fun. I’m still usually in the office until late working on the survey and planning how to manage our staff*, but the field is the best part. Older RAs claim that I’ll rapidly tire of the unpleasant working conditions and high risk of dengue, but I remain naively optimistic.

But more on the field experience! The other RA on the project does more of the field work (and I do more with data), but I still get to do a fair amount. Since I don’t speak Hindi, I mostly coordinate the staff that does the surveying and then watch the questions being asked in order to figure out problems in the survey**. Here I have to make the most of my paltry vocabulary, but fortunately, most of what I need to know can be gauged from a)what the surveyor rights down, and how they do it; b) body language and c) speech patterns. Sometimes it’s as simple as “oh yeah, people get super uncomfortable if you ask them if they own their house without warming them up with easy questions”**. But the most interesting (and difficult) is when we learn about whole new types of financial networks and then have to rewrite the questionnaire accordingly. It is a great way to learn how to write a survey, though the worst mistakes can be embarrassingly compounded by our surveyors. In one case, we were asking a series of questions about people who had once lived in the household. We found out that one person had died, making the remainder of questions about them irrelevant (e.g. how much does it cost for them to get to work?). Unfortunately, the surveyor continued, and the question immediately following the one where we found out they died, was “Where are they now?”. The afterlife was not one of the options, and needless to say, the household was not as amused as I was. Don’t worry, I kept a calm/horrified expression on.

I want to share so much, but will restrain myself to one or two vignettes. Something that I never stop finding funny is how people react to me being there. Every time we go out, I am inevitably asked “What are you doing here?”, “What is this for?”, and my personal favorite: “Are you lost?” The kids are the most amusing: most of the time, there is a crowd around whichever surveyor I am with while the survey is conducted. The other day, I had one stand about a foot away from my face and stare at me for literally the entire 1 hour of the interview. I didn’t once see his eyes blink, which was kind of creepy. But I can now officially say “eat your words!” to the girl who in fifth grade said that if you stared at my face for more than 20 seconds, you would go blind***! Or perhaps she was right, and the shock kept him rooted in place?

Even when I blind their children, the people we interview tend to be incredibly friendly and gracious****, certainly to a much greater extent than I am towards surveyors in the US! In addition to their willingness to give an hour of time for little material gain, I have been offered countless cups of water and chai, and chairs to sit on while the respondent squats on the ground. The chai is especially interesting: it is incredibly rude to refuse, so when you are offered it, you’re pretty much stuck in place for at least 15 minutes drinking it. At a number of households, people have used it strategically, offering it just before the interview was up to keep us there. Yet it sometimes is offered even when the respondents don’t like us. One time, a respondent was getting annoyed at the length of the survey, and after mocking me and the survey in Hindi, he finally told us to get out of his house. Undeterred, our surveyor kept reading through questions (note: we train them not to do this, don’t tell our human subjects committee plz), and he started using more and more expletives to tell us to leave. Finally, after one particularly solid rant, he sat back, sighed, and said, “Would you like some chai?” I accepted.

The field work changes greatly everyday, with both incredible highs and lows. Solidly in the latter category are those times when I am huddled inside a tenement of tarps and sticks while the monsoons turn the area into a sea of thousands of floating islands of literal crap *****, and I want to be back in Parrish 4th, staring out my window and safe from the rains. But then the rain stops, and I’m learning someone’s life story, fit into boxes for the purposes of the survey, but nonetheless completely interesting and foreign to me. And those times, I think to myself that this is exactly where I want to be. Here’s hoping for more of those moments.

Note: For intellectual property reasons, I didn't want to give too many details about the exact nature of our intervention and study, but if you are interested, I'd be happy to tell more (but probably not everything) in a conversation that the whole internet can't read.

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* I now have over 40 people who work directly for me, with the power to fire them, and many of them are more than twice my age. I fear that I am dangerously close to becoming a real adult.
**The vast majority of people do not own the land they are living on and worry about eviction. This is less the case when I am there, as they can usually tell I am not from the Indian government.
***Yeah, that girl was MEAN.
****But people also often yell at us to get the hell out of their houses. So it’s a mix.
*****The monsoons are no joke. When it rains, the open sewers overflow to carry up all the waste that wasn’t already in the street, the “road” disappears completely into the mud, and many households flood because they’re not built off of the ground. Not cool.