Trabajo Agotador

[Exhausting work]


I am dog tired with only two half-days of rest in the last two weeks.


Those two weeks have been full of a combination of data collection and last-minute preparations for data collection. In days between surveying, I have been traveling to surveying communities to characterize them: talking with local authorities to figure out where the barrios of interest are, their relative composition of Dominicans and Haitians, devising plans for sampling in these barrios, etc. Days later, we travel to these communities to actually execute the data collection. I have my last couple of community visits today, and we'll finish out over the weekend.


This has been a great push to get this work done, and after Sunday, I'll be relieved to have some more rest and time to spend a couple days out of the city. The constant noise of the city is wearing on me, and I'm really looking forward to vacating to do something fun for a short time. 


We're reaching an inflection point in the project. As we're finishing with the surveys, we're ramping up for the qualitative aspects of the projects. Trying to plan ways to make contacts with people in the communities where we've surveyed to coordinate in-depth interviews and recruit people for focus groups. It should be really interesting to see what comes out of these conversations - deeper, more detailed accounts of people's experiences. It will be information that transcends what we're able to gather through the more concrete survey format.


And for me, I'll be spending more and more time in front of the computer, entering data: the stacks of surveys are piling up and will be very time consuming to go through.