Today begins the one month countdown to my trip home to Massachusetts and the four week countdown to my last day of work. I am certainly looking forward to going home for the first time in 8 months, but I feel very crunched for time as far as my project goes.
This week has been a rough one for my practicum. On Monday, I spent most of the afternoon trying to get in touch with five women in Juárez and one in El Paso. I absolutely hate trying to chase people down, especially when it is an epic failure. I called one house in Juárez at least a dozen times in order to confirm an appointment for a postpartum interview that I had previously set up with a woman for Tuesday morning. I managed to talk to the woman's husband and to her sister, but never to her. All the phone calls made me appreciate how much I don't miss spending 50% of my time on the phone at the clinic I worked at in Savannah, and also made me appreciate the ease of calling local numbers. In order to call Juárez from my office, I have to dial 9-011-52-1-656-xxx-xxxx. That is a lot of dialing!
I spent Tuesday morning in Juárez. As you probably predicted, the woman who I was scheduled to interview didn't show up. I waited for a little over an hour before giving up. However, it was nice to spend time with the clinical manager and one of the residents. We chatted a lot about the Mexican health care system and about both of their desires to eventually live and work in the United States. I was especially grateful that they could acknowledge my frustration with women not showing up for the follow-up interviews while gently reminding me that it's to be expected at some level when doing any type of research. Then they very kindly called all five participants from that hospital to schedule appointments with them for Friday. They didn't mention anything about doing an interview, instead saying that they wanted to schedule postpartum check-ups. I expressed my concern that they were lying to the women, but they said they would definitely do an exam on the women and then ask the women if I could do a second interview with them since I was conveniently present that day. Three of the five women picked up the phone, and the clinical manager promised to call all five women back again on Thursday to confirm the appointments. I left the hospital feeling hopeful about Friday, but then when I saw 15 people getting deported while I was walking back across the bridge, I couldn't help but feel kind of down.
This morning, I returned to Juárez with the expectation of getting at least one postpartum interview. However, none of the women showed up for their appointments. I nearly cried when I realized that I've exhausted every possible way to follow-up with this group of women. The clinical manager patiently explained that women in this health system (seguro popular) are not used to returning to the clinic for care after giving birth. Plus, with my participants being so young (none of them are of age to get a driver's license!), I know that transportation can be especially difficult. Protecting me from being completely downtrodden was a once again enjoyable couple of hours spent in the staff room. The guard and most of the clinical and clerical staff now knows me (I am, after all, supposedly the only gringa that goes there regularly) and always warmly greets me, which feels really welcoming. Plus, today the sister of one of the residents was visiting from the city of Chihuahua, so we sat and chatted the entire two hours I spent waiting for my participants to show up. She's a dentist and told me a lot about the rest of the state of Chihuahua as well as about Mexico City, where she's originally from. We also talked a lot about the public school systems in our respective countries, which I think was very educational (no pun intended) for both of us. She also seemed genuinely interested in me and my work, and was eager to exchange phone numbers. I love expanding my network here :)
On top of my follow-up problems in Juárez, I was supposed to have a meeting this week to start work at a seguro social hospital there. However, the people I need to meet with have yet to get back to me. I also still haven't gotten any new participants in El Paso. One doctor thought he had a potential woman to enroll, but she declined. Plus, I have been continuously unable to reach one participant here who gave birth a few weeks ago in order to conduct the postpartum interview. Gah!
In addition to doing my own qualitative work, I've also been helping out with a lot of quantitative work in my office. I really like this, as it especially helps to reinforce my statistical/programming knowledge. However, this week was very frustrating. First, this week I received the fourth disk of data from the state of Texas that I'm supposed to be analyzing. The first three were all either blank disks or the wrong files, and it turns out that the fourth disk was also blank. Additionally, I've been helping another graduate student learn how to write code on SAS. However, she's trying to work with a very complex data set from Mexico, so I spent most of my afternoons this week trying to troubleshoot some things with that. I've actually been very successful, which is certainly affirming for me, but it's been super time-consuming and tedious.
I don't want y'all to think that things are all bad here, though. For instance, on Tuesday night I was able to get dinner and margaritas with my friend Michelle from Emory. She finished her practicum in Kenya on Monday, so we could definitely empathize with each other's field work challenges. And last night I attended a movie night at the Columban Mission Center, which is a really cool place where I want to try to spend more time. We watched "The Gatekeeper", which was super intense but very well-done- I totally recommend it.
To be honest, despite my major challenges, I am still happy here. I am learning so much, from how to conduct field research to some random things about Juarense culture. (Side note: Today, every pregnant woman I saw in Juárez was wearing a safety pin on her clothes in front of where her belly button is. Turns out that it's a common superstition that on particular days, in this case Friday the 13th, the safety pins are needed to protect the baby from harm.) I feel very passionate about what I'm studying, and I feel quite confident that I'll be back in El Paso soon after graduating from Emory to continue this type of work on the border. So I guess I just have to continue to be flexible with what I expect to get out of my analysis and continue to work hard with an optimistic attitude so that I can get as much more done as possible in the next few weeks.
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