Research Update

We have gotten our target number of patients (150) interviewed and are going to put into those dandy folks at the Center for the Protection of Human Subjects to interview 100 more since we are scheduled for another week of interviews around the district we are working in. Good stuff.
Patients and hospital workers alike are fairly ammenable to our idea, however it is difficult to explain that we dont actually have any money (or authority) to implement at this stage and that this is just a preliminary investigation. It is also tough to explain to people that no, they cant have our laptop, and no we cant give everyone mobile phones. (the computers will be donated at the end of the trip however they unfortunately were claimed by people higher up the food chain for letting us in and making things a littl easier for us-hopefully they wil be put to good use and not sold for personal profit.)
There have been some serious issues with miscommunication-the district TB director didnt do his job of alerting some of the earlier places we were to visit very well (we would show up and people were pissed off and confused that we were there, though once we explained ourselves all was better) and so we will be going back to visit them in the coming week. In addition, even if the communication got to the right hospital staff things would get lost in translation between staff and patients (they were asked to come pikc up medicine on a specific day that we would be there). When we arrived in Namanga last wednesday we arrived to a mass, many somalian refugees. Apparently the patients had gotten talking and the story had grown into western doctors coming who could treat all sorts of ailments and make them better quickly. In a town with a hospital wth no electricty this was very exciting news and it was very difficult to get things set straight and turn away people when they saw we were giving the patients interviewed food. The refugees in particular were very sad-tmany tried to pretent to have TB, and some that were actually interviewed could not speak a word of any of the local dialects and could not do the inerview We were probably bamboozled out of a lot of food, but no one really cared since it was going to people who really really needed it.
Per our research advisors, we have to hire a professional to shoot some video of us at work. None of us is thrilled about this since we're going to have to get permission from each and every patient the camera even goes near to protec their rights under CPHS and many of the patients do not want their pictures taken. Its a pain in the ass to set up since there arent exactly a lot of professional videographers runnig around here. Eddie mknows someone but he's not proving to be too reliable so far.