'Story-Telling' in the Field

New Urdu words of the day:

• Kismish (raisins)
• Saara (all -for some reason I always thought this meant 'good', but evidently I was wrong)
• Bahana Banana (excuse-making, 'story-telling'... lying, essentially)

I almost went into the field today. I mean, I did, technically. An urban slum called Landhi Town. I went with one of the supervising doctors -we were going just to meet with one family who had recently called to drop out of the study, find out why, try explaining how beneficial it would be to their child for them to stay in (field studies here are a different ball-game entirely, apparently, when it comes to ethics... well, you'd change your ethical framework too if you saw what I saw today and what these field coordinators see every day -the Western model just doesn't work because poverty and ignorance in theory are very different from when it's in your face, as is the disease, lack of hygiene, etc...)... and mainly, we needed to convince the grandmother (the father's mother) that CF is a good idea for her grandchild. See, this is how it works: old people in the old country actually have a very important, respected status in the household. So if grandma doesn't like it, it ain't happening. Which is why we were hoping to convince grandma too.

Unfortunately, we didn't get the chance to convince anyone. When we got there, various people were basically bahana-banana-ing about the whereabouts of the mother. And I tell you, these guys are expert liars. One dude even when out of his way, walking with us 4 blocks to some vacated building telling us, "This is where she lives". Luckily, my supervisor and our AKU driver were not born yesterday. But what can you do -it's not like we could force ourselves into her home right... so we basically, just drove back to campus.

However, even though I didn't get to see the way CF actually happens in the field, I did get to see what some of the 'fields' actually look like. This particular one was not so much a hardcore shanty-town style slum, but an 'urban slum', as I mentioned earlier. You could see the conditions that people live in, the poverty they bear, and you could quite viscerally smell the hopelessness, even during the spittles of rain, despite the children playing in the streets, between goats and bicycles and street BBQ, and the man walking around with a plate of freshly sliced naryal (coconut) for sale... you also see men just sitting on the side of the road with literal rags tacked up on the wall behind them, as though they were selling them... which I guess they must have been... and other men digging in what looks like a dump, by the side of an old railroad, and women lugging things home, with too many kids about them and a spiritual heaviness too, exhausted and drone-like, making their way between alleys and garbage... the fruit market in this area did look delicious though, I must say (don't worry, I wouldn't eat anything from there -not about to go about trying for a hit of typhoid or hepatitis)!

Food in the AKU caf was pretty good today. Keema-paratha for breakfast (so not a breakfast food for most of you, I know, but heaven-on-Earth for people like me, who most of the time could not care less for standard breakfast foods...), and then Nihari (which I had never had before) and naan for lunch... and then a pretty good daal with rice for dinner (gotta go veg somewhere!)... anyway, I've been working on a presentation on CF all afternoon (nowhere near done... you know how these things go...) but I'm absolutely exhausted.

Peacing out for the night...