52%

I started collecting data for my dissertation project in August. The plan was to enroll two children a week for about six months, with an ultimate goal of enrolling 50 kids, all recently arrived refugees. Half of them were going to be from Buffalo and half from Rochester. By September I had two kids enrolled, and by the end of October I had...six. I have enrolled exactly zero children from Buffalo, and that number is not going to increase for boring logistical reasons I probably shouldn't go into on the World Wide Internet.

I am enrolling children who come from any country, and I rarely know ahead of time where they'll be from. Even when I do, that doesn't necessarily tell me what language they'll speak. In August and September there was a huge influx of people from Burma and it took a couple months for someone to locate the two people in Rochester who spoke Burmese and the three people among the incoming refugees who spoke English. It turned out many of the refugees didn't even speak Burmese, only Karen, a language specific to the incoming ethnic group.

Although all the people who work with refugees would prefer a slow stream of people coming in throughout the year, it doesn't always work out that way; sometimes the system is completely swamped (like, for example, right when I started collecting data) and other times there is no one coming in. Sometimes in all the chaos it is difficult for me to identify people eligible for my study. It is important for me not to miss anyone because with only Rochester as a study site, I will need every one I can find to get to 50.

I had planned to interview the children's parents while they were in the clinic for a health screening, but the clinic is very busy and the interpreters are in much demand. After a few months I realized that I would need to do try something new. Since November I have been traveling with an interpreter to do the interviews at the families' homes.

Yesterday I left my car in the clinic parking lot and drove with an interpreter to do an interview. When we got back the gate to the parking lot was closed. I vaguely remembered that the gate opens when you drive towards it from inside. I also remembered that the gate is set to "nerve-wracking" and only opens when you drive up to within a few inches of it. I had to squeeze through a tiny little space to get back into the lot, which I barely managed to do. Adding to the excitement, it was about ten degrees and very windy. So I made it to the car and held my breath as I nosed the car up to the gate, which miraculously did open. If I am not qualified to do fieldwork after this I don't know what you want of me.

Over the past few months I have been considering all sorts of different scenarios for finishing up data collection, but all of them have been very tentative because I have never been very confident about how things would go. It's hard to make plans when I don't know if I will be finished in June or in December or in a different June. That's the point of a PhD, right? Learning to live with uncertainty?

In response to complaints from all over the country, the federal government is making an effort to have refugees coming in throughout the year instead of mostly in the summer and fall, and already this year I have noticed many more people arriving than in January 2007. As of yesterday, I have enrolled 26 kids from six countries. I have identified enough children who are probably eligible that I think I can get up to 35-40 just from the list I have now, and more families should be arriving in the next few months. It is even possible that I will be able to add an additional study site. So all of sudden, after months and months of work, this project is actually going well. There are still plenty of things that could go wrong, but this is the first time there is a real possibility that I will actually finish.

Baby steps, right?