July 6, 2011
Some of the friends I have made here in Harare enjoying an afternoon together!
After having a memorable time in Buhera district, it has taken me a while to get used to the peacefulness and quiet nature of Harare and the IRD office. In the last couple of weeks I have moved into a separate cottage of the IRD office and, in order to avoid things becoming too monotonous (from living at the same place that I work), I find myself going the extra mile in search of fun social events. Most of my time here in Harare has been occupied with work, now that the survey is done, Patrick (the other IRD intern) and I have to enter in all the data and analyze the information. The main purpose is to document impacts of the REVALUE program that were not expected in the original design and to use the information we collect to mobilize resources, so as to implement economic growth programs that impact orphans and vulnerable children (OVC). My main focus areas in the survey include the diet diversification of the children, so, I composed a diet diversity indicator based on the guidelines of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). That basically entailed a 24 hr household recall where we asked what the children had to eat the day before and we singled out children under 2 and asked different questions to reflect their breastfeeding needs. I was also in charge of the psychosocial aspects, so I adapted a set of questions based on a previous OVC survey conducted in Zambia. Lastly I constructed some questions on the basic health status of the children.
“Make yourself at home. You are like family!” said the chief of Pon Kam village. I sat on a mat on the floor of the chief’s house eating a mango that an older woman had peeled and given to me. I’d only met the chief an hour ago. He didn’t even know my name yet, and he was telling me I was like family. We laughed as we talked about the differences in Lao and American culture, and recited the names of different fruits in Lao, English, Korean, Japanese, Spanish, and French. He found the English word, “banana” particularly funny. He looked at his wife straight-faced, then blurted out “BANANA!”, and burst into unrestrained laughter. The plates of jackfruit and pineapple that surrounded me came from his trees. The chief went and picked them himself, and proudly presented them as part of the feast that we shared that evening in his home with about 15 other villagers. 
Hello from Quelimane, Mozambique! My internship partner Marques and I have now relocated from Maxixe to Quelimane for the second project of our internship. But before I tell you about that, a little bit about what I’ve been up to since I last wrote.
This weekend was supposed to be a long weekend because Monday was a holiday, but we had to come in on Saturday because we were a behind on the distributions. We came in on Saturday and there were a ton of people there – 85 families, which included over 50 children whose height and weight we had to take. We should have been finished around noon, but there were problems with the internet (all the surveys and nutritional surveys are done online) and we ended up staying until after 2. I hurried to get lunch, worried that I was going to get there and there would be no food. The women at my restaurant know I come every day so they had saved me food and I went home happy.
