Work

I haven't written about the project in a long time so for the sake of bloggy posterity, here's the deal.

At the end of June I projected a large shortfall in the number of interviews that could be completed by the end of August, so I made two suggestions to the PI. First we should offer to pay the field teams for leave not taken. This would prevent a situation where two entire days each month are lost to time off. Of course individuals can still take a day if they want but the idea was maximize time in the field. Second, I finagled four new fieldworkers to add to the original 12. New fieldworkers means more transportation was needed, so we added a rental car in addition to the two large vans we already had. All this was quite an investment but done within budget and the new folks started mid-June. That's going fine.

With 16 fieldworkers we started pulling in a lot more interviews per day and it looks like we can make the deadline. But not so fast... did my projections count the number of days correctly? Turns out, not quite, because of the way payment works here. Allow me to explain.

People get paid once per month in these parts. People in very rural areas (like my field teams) don't have banks in their villages. That means that come pay day, everyone goes to Hazyview or Thulamahashe or Bushbuckridge or another local city to withdraw some money. Month-end pay day is traditionally the day you take off work so you can go to the city. It's just the way it is here. Everyone expects that they won't have to work the last Friday of the month.

Now, I tried to communicate with the teams that they will be paid for every day through August 31, and if they have leave leftover at the end they will be paid for it. But this concept was very hard to make clear, in part because their contracts stipulate that the two days off are (1) a floating day to be taken when needed and (2) you guessed it- month-end. So there was quite a bit of confusion coming into last Friday. Turned out that everyone wanted the day off. No one wanted to earn an entire day's pay as a bonus to put off their trip to the city until Saturday.

I guess it's easier to empathize with this decision when you imagine that you are only paid once a month, you earn very little money, and you probably have a lot of family asking for a piece of your paycheck. Add to that the fact that after weeks without money you really just need to blow off a little steam and I think it's not hard to understand why the teams didn't want to work.

The down side of course is that I am left 250 interviews short for last week and the deficit is not closing as fast as it should be. We have now completed about 7,000 out of 12,776 9 weeks into a 13-week project. So we're adding an extra four days to the field operations to give us a fifth week. We should average 1200 per week, except there's a holiday on August 9 and of course people will probably want to leave on the last Friday in August, so... we'll see.

And there's a little peek at some of the work I do.