Day 3: June 12, 2007, Sink or Swim

Today was our first real day of interviews. As Rich said yesterday, we had agreed to run pilot interviews with the entire PAI (abbreviation for Expanded Programme for Immunizations in Spanish) office. While this is our “home away from home”, it was definitely intimidating to run a pilot interview session with the entire office. It felt like we were thrown into a deep pool, but I guess that’s the best way to learn. We either sank and fall flat on our faces, or swam and they’d tell us that we are ready to venture into new facilities for more interviews. It’s only our ENTIRE project riding on this one pilot study no big deal…

To add pressure to the situation, we began by speaking to the whole group at once – about 15 people –about the benefits of NFI and drawbacks of needles and syringes as if they didn’t know (it’s always hard when you tell experts about their own fields). Allow me to digress for one second, when I say “we spoke”, please understand that I mean Azucena because the rest of the gringos are OK (Mike) and poor (Sapun and Rich) Spanish speakers. As it were, Azucena did a great job of describing all of our introductory material about NFI, and they seemed pretty interested in what she was saying.

After Azucena completed the intro, Mike and I were in charge of demonstrations to show how the devices work. Mike’s demo went quite well, and they seemed impressed by the device and its ease of use. However, my demo was a different story because I couldn’t get the package open for the ampule. This was so embarrassing, and I felt pretty dense. My feeling was later confirmed when I was told that the head honcho said, "you’re losing points” when it happened…Not a good impression to leave with the person in charge of our collective fate.

Nonetheless, after a rough demo, people were interested and they stuck around so that we could interview them in smaller groups. Mike and Azucena interviewed four people, Rich and our PAI helper interviewed two people, and I was flying solo with one person. You can imagine how my interview turned out – but you’re wrong! I was able to effectively communicate with my subject and have a broken conversation about the devices and learned quite a bit. Definitely one of those experiences where I nodded a lot and didn’t understand too much, but I think that everybody has to go through that with a foreign language. It can only get better from there.

Anyhow, by the end of the day, the office personnel were pretty pleased with our work and helped us set up meetings with other health facilities and local governing bodies around Santo Domingo. We passed the test!

Now off to the real world….

-Sapun