Lost in translation....and some other stuff

Just to give you an update, all of the interviews have been translated, edited and copied and the interviews started today!!!!! It turns out we have about 5 facilitators from the DISHA team (conducting the HIV+ interviews) and 5 from the SureStart team (conducting the HIV-/unknown status interviews); therefore, it will take about 10 days. I plan to get 10 interviews back each day and translate the Marathi answers into English. Unfortunately, all of this means that all of the interviews will not be finished until Wednesday, July 2nd and I leave on July 7th. Today I had 2 separate meetings w/ the DISHA and SureStart community health workers to address all of their questions, problems, concerns etc. There was only one mis-translation/ miscommunication problem about one of the questions with the DISHA team. There were a few complaints with the SureStart team about how long the interviews took (about 2 hours) because the women who were responding to the questions have a lot of work in the morning and can’t give up that much time. So, they’ve decided to start interviewing in the afternoon. A lot of the SureStart members were worried about what they should write down if the respondent doesn’t know what HIV/AIDS is, and they were worried about some of the responses concerning myths about HIV transmission etc. But I told them that’s exactly what I wanted to hear. I want to know what the respondents already know, what they think they know, what they don’t know and what they want to know, because that’s the only way an effective awareness program can be created. Sure, it's frustrtating to create these interviews, know them inside and out, and then worry that they aren't being conducted correctly to get the information we want to collect. But, I don't have a choice...and that's something that I'll just have to learn to deal with.
As mentioned before in the objectives for this project, we plan to create an awareness program, so I have a bit of a dilemma (i.e. 2 options). One option is to carry out the project at home in America, while the other option is to pass it on to another volunteer. I would love to carry out this project from home, but the truth is that I’m not really qualified to…I have no experience; I don’t know the first thing about developing an awareness program. However, I feel that this is my project, kind of like my baby, not an obligation. I want to at least be involved in creating the program.
Once I have the answers to the interviews, I will understand what the women in the slums know about HIV/AIDS specifically in relation to MTCT and how they feel about HIV+ women reproducing. I feel that in order to reduce the stigma and discrimination surrounding this issue, we need to focus on teaching them basic facts about HIV/AIDS, and then we can proceed to teaching HIV+ women how to prevent MTCT through ways that that they can afford. Obviously, ARVs aren’t a viable option for slum dwellers, but milk substitutes may be. Also, with a program like SureStart and their hospital referral system, the families could save up money for a C-section instead of a normal vaginal birth.

Some side notes:
I’ve been doing some side projects and there have been some updates on other projects going on. In some of my past blogs I talked about the IDU site called the Pune City Action Plan that was located in Pimpri and that I’ve made ID cards, logos and letterheads for, well, they just opened up their new center closer to the city at 2pm.
Not last weekend, but the weekend before that, I attended a performance by Saheli kids. Saheli is another NGO that is a sex workers collective in Pune that takes care of kids of sex workers. Some of these kids have been pulled from the red light district, while others were put into the program. So, some of the volunteers at Deep Griha want to take them out to the park and hang out with them a few days during the week. Also, for the first week of July, a few us, especially including Bhavana, a Sahara volunteer (another NGO that takes care of HIV+ patients) who has had a lot of experience with working with sex workers and understanding their relationship with the society including the law, would like to try and get other sex worker collective NGOs together and do something for their international awareness week. So although I only have a little over 2 weeks left, I’m going to try and help out with these last two projects.