Door to Door

In Mali you get a lot of traffic knocking (or not knocking) on your door. Beyond the ubiquitous flow of children visiting Rex - you get shoe cleaners and toothbrush sellers (oddly both of these merchants have their own special song so you can recognize them from far away). There are also the religious figures/beggars who sing songs asking for money. The other day, I had a woman, wearing a badge, come into my courtyard and wait patiently for me to calm Rex down and come over. I asked her what she had and she said - medicine. I looked in her big blue bag and saw a slew of Chinese male enhancement potions. I said no thanks. Mali is launching their national census this week, too - so Malians are fairly used to these types of interruptions and visitations.

Nevertheless, going house to house is a daunting challenge. We (my survey team) has already done about 70 of these visits. It's been amazing to see the diversity within Bamako (languages, income, houses, perceptions of wealth, politics, etc). We use a map of our target school district and draw a grid over it. The I have an online randomizer pick the quadrant where we survey for the day. We start in the middle of the quadrant and flip a coin to determine which direction each team goes in. We then stop at every 5th house and ask if they would be willing to take our survey. We've interviewed a 90 year old guy, former civil servants, sex segregated households - I have had to go talk to the women while my male colleague talks to the men-folk, Arab households, Peul households, Songhai households. One house randomly selected yesterday belonged to an American.

People are overwhelmingly generous with their time and everything else. People generally listen carefully, bring us water, and give us blessing for our work. So far households have been surprisingly open, very few times have we been refused. Yesterday, we went to what Malians refer to as a "Wahabyi household." It was a house where women wear black burquas and face coverings, which stand in sharp contrast to the bright loud fabrics Malian women usually wear. We saw a woman come out and i admit I was a bit scared to go inside and ask if we could do our political survey, but the man inside was more than welcoming and one of our most attentive and frank interviewees. I am very fortunate to be in such an open and communcative country for fieldwork. I can't imagine how hard it would be to try to do a 45 minute survey with political questions in a more closed society.