Our First Week...

We have been in Cambodia almost a week now, having arrived Monday June 8th. Sonia, the director of our project met us at the airport and we set out to find our hotel. The next day was spent at the National Veterinary Research Institute (NaVRI) in the outskirts of Phnom Penh. We worked with 3 NaVRI employees editing and attempting to help translate the survey Veterinarians Without Borders provided. Explaining the questions to the NaVRI staff in order to ensure they were properly translated took up the majority of the time. In the end, the appropriate changes were made and the survey was ready for translation.

The next day, the 10th of June, we went into the province of Kandal to obtain permission to enter the villages, select the villages for our surveys and to pick up a required Provincial Veterinarian to accompany us. This consumed the better part of the morning and at around 11am we arrived at a village that had not been selected for our surveys to pilot test the questionnaire. We arrived at the village chief’s house and much to our surprise we were told to come back in 3 hours, as lunch is from 11am-2pm. We went out for a really nice lunch in a local restaurant where we were served shrimp and lemongrass soup kept warm over a flame, along with rice (of course) and fried egg, vegetables and other stir-fried items. After lunch we went to a large open area by a river and discussed the survey with our translators over iced sugar cane juice. This discussion really helped our translators understand how questions should be asked and reiterated what information we were hoping to obtain from each question. We headed back to the village and performed our pilot surveys. The pilot run was exceptionally useful in that it helped to identify the most time consuming and confusing questions in the survey. We found that surveys were very long, ranging from about 20 minutes to over half an hour in length each. This was a bit concerning for us, as 20 minutes was the maximum time per survey reasonable in regard to completing 250 surveys in 10 days (with travel time and the rather large lunch hour factored in). Going to a place not frequented by westerners was a really fascinating experience for us all, and we found the people we interviewed were really friendly and willing to provide information. Overall it was a very long but useful day.

The next day was spent at NaVRI, making the appropriate revisions and translations. Sonia ended up staying late until 7:30pm working with our translators to perfect the changes while we went to run errands for our survey (printing tables off for record keeping, buying incentive gifts for the interviewees, etc).

On the morning of the 12th we piloted the revised version of our survey. It went so much smoother and we only identified a few more changes that needed to be made. Sonia met us in the afternoon at the Ministry of Animal Health in Phnom Penh, where we explained our project and requested permission to survey different communities within the city. After we were granted permission, groups within the communities were selected and we returned to NaVRI to put the finishing touches on the questionnaire.

It is hard to believe we have been here a week already! It really flew by because we were so busy preparing everything. We all agree however, that our hard work has paid off and we are quite pleased with the final product. The goals set out for our project seem more attainable now with the changes we made to the survey, and the questions seem to be clearer for the interviewees. We still have several obstacles to overcome, such as the random selection of houses within villages and how we will achieve the appropriate random distribution as we go from household to household. It would be easier if we had a map of each village or if the communities were set up like the ‘cookie-cutter’ subdivisions in North American suburbia, however this is far from reality here. We are hoping to work out those details this evening or tomorrow morning before we start our data collection.

Although we have not had an extensive amount of time to explore Phnom Penh we have found the city to be quite intriguing. There is substantial European (French) influence evident throughout it, with large open boulevards and green parks and gardens set amongst the polluted chaos. It is quite the contrast! In addition to exploring some of the crazy and crowded markets this weekend, we decided to go to the S21 museum and the killing fields. It was a very sobering and disturbing experience, seeing the atrocities and crimes against humanity that occurred here only 30 years ago. It was a really big ‘eye-opener’ for us and really put a lot of things into perspective.

Tomorrow we start data collection and we will spend the entire week surveying in the province of Kandal. We will post another update at the end of the week about our endeavours.

Until then,
Amanda, Matt, Ryan, and Gill

Authored by Amanda Breuer