The second week - training

Training of our surveyors began on Monday, Sept 4. We had 9 teams of 4 "enqueteurs" and their supervisors, so 45 total! The supervisors were the men responsible for the management of all the public health indicators in each of the regions of Niger, so were very experienced in data management. The surveyors all had backgrounds in medicine, statistics, or epidemiology and were a very highly educated bunch!
Below are the coordination team - Idrissa Sabiti, the deputy coordinator for the national malaria control program, Jodi, Sanouna Issifi, the epidemiologist for the national program, me, Etienne, the Cameroonian data manger from WHO Harare (Zimbabwe), Marcel Lama, the survey director, again from WHO in Harare, and Habi Gado, the WHO Niger malaria coordinator. Quite a crew!!

We held the training in a conference room in Niamey's new stadium. Below are our folks in class - training consisted of study background and methodology, learning the questionnaire and PDA basics (which I taught), and then going through the questionnaire question by question and deciding as a group how to phrase the questions (written in French) in the local languages of Djerma and Hausa. Very time intensive and some questions stimulated quite a debate. I kept thinking about how much my translator/linguist parents would have enjoyed it! They also practiced extensively in small groups, role playing with the questionnaire to get practice administering it (and finding the bugs Jodi and I had missed!)

Marcel was an amazing teacher and great at getting class participation. I really enjoyed watching him!

Since the training was held in a stadium, and there were frequent soccer matches, we often went into the stadium during breaks to watch soccer. Jodi had a camera with a great zoom that did a great job with action shots.The last day in class, we did a scavenger hunt with the PDAs, mapping 10 sites around the stadium with the GPS that everyone had to use the GPS to navigate to. It was very important that they be able to navigate back to previously mapped points top conduct the surveys. Here they are in the stadium parking lot trying to mavigate to the points.

We had one practice day in a village just outside Niamey to make sure everyone understood how to administer the questionnaire and to iron out bugs. Here is one of our surveyors demonstrating mastery of using the PDA to administer the survey with one of the women in the village. Great eye contact!

I loved all the village scenes we came across as I walked around the village with the surveyors. Here is a young woman getting "henna-ed" in preparation for a wedding. Some of the designs were just beautiful. The henna used is black, in comparison with the red henna I was more familiar with. (I went to all my residency interviews with my hand hennaed after a friend's wedding - takes a while to wear off!)