Out of Our Control

There are many barriers to implementing and research project. In studies such as the one I am working on, you want to be able to control for as many things as possible. Control basically means keeping things as equal between the groups as possible. This includes factors inside and outside the school; number of students at the school, economic position of the students’ families, number of boys vs. girls, ages of the students. But in real life, there is very very little you have control over in your own life and even less in a study such as this. Take a little thing like Mother Nature…

Snow days. Every child’s fantasy once that temperature goes down and the days get shorter. For kids up north, hardly ever realized because as much it may snow, there exists plows, salt, and the infamous two hour delay. But every once and a while, out of sheer volume of blizzard-like proportions there’s a snow day. Here in Haiti, it’s rain.

And not just your lazy Sunday morning rain, sip a pot of coffee all day long rain, read a few chapters, knit a few scarves rain. No. More like monsoon rain. I’m talking rain that pours and pours and pours for hours on end. Rain that creates flash floods, mud slides, gorges down the mountains. Lots of rain. And what happens the next day? Cap-Haitien literally becomes an island in itself. There’s nowhere for the water to go except downstream. But what happens when that stream gets back-up or cut off from the ocean because of construction, trash and debris? It floods roads and more importantly, people’s homes. They can’t go anywhere or do anything until the water eventually recedes. This can take days.

And schools close. If teachers don’t want to brave the flooded roads – or can’t find transportation to take them through the flooded roads, they can’t teach. If parents can’t – or won’t send their children out into the flooded street to go to school, they can’t learn. If the school itself is under water, creating a breeding haven for mosquitos (which carry malaria, dengue and other horrible shit) it can’t be open.

This doesn’t just happen once or twice a year, but drastically affects the amount of school days that are actually open. Haiti has two rainy seasons. The big one is in October/November and comes with hurricanes. This school year, for nearly two months the kids had maybe a week or two of school because there was just that much rain. Which seriously hindered our ability to begin our project and in fact, delayed the start of the distribution until after Christmas break. This shortened the project from the original length of the school year (none months) to just five. Ugh. Now, April and May – the second rainy season. Although smaller, the rain is now unpredictable. It can come at any time and no one knows for how long it will rain. It could be for twenty minutes like two nights ago. Not a big deal. Or, it could be for four hours like this past Saturday, flooding everything. A big deal.

Again, it’s unpredictable so some schools on Monday could still be flooded and others not at all. And rather than a school district deciding whether to close all schools in an area, it’s up to the school director to decide. So if you happen to go to a school with a not so passionate, actually kinda lazy director you won’t have school and you won’t get mamba and you won’t be learning the same amount as other kids.

As you can imagine, this is a much larger problem than just for this study. But for us, it’s frustrating. We want the kids to be eating the mamba as much as possible – but in order for that to happen, they have to be in school. And we want every kid to be eating the same amount as any other kid, aka we want ALL the schools to be open when ALL the other schools are. When they’re not, the kids aren’t benefiting from getting an extra food source and it makes the data we collect harder to show an impact. We could have a great product here; it could be an amazing program that can seriously impact child micronutrient deficiencies. But we may also never know that because there are so many things out of our control that keep the kids from getting those benefits. A big hurdle that we have no control over what-so-ever. So while you have to accept Mother Nature’s wrath or blessing, you also have to realize what you’re giving up.

On an unrelated note, this March my study had some great visitors from Edesia, the company that makes mamba. They were able to come and visit the schools, hang out with the kids and watch as we collected our midline data. If you're interested in seeing some of the great shots their photographer snagged, check out the link to their Picasa page. Also, check out their website to learn more about mamba and other products that they make. Great people, great work and a pleasure to have worked with them.

Pictures: https://picasaweb.google.com/EdesiaGlobal/EdesiaVisitToHaitiMamba#5859271158546230594
Website: www.edesiaglobal.org