has never been explained to me. Personally, the whole notion of statistics
falls into the 'spirit crushingly dull' tray of my brain. I even find myself
reading the subject bars of e-mails and the mere mention of the word
'statistics' or it's evil twin 'data collection' and it's straight in the
file marked, 'stuff to read when I'm old, unable to move, and barking mad'.
Yes, yes yes I know it's very important to know what is going on,
particularly in clinics where we are not present all of the time, this doesn
't stop it being about as interesting as creosote.
It's the one part of this job I loathe. Every month four members of staff,
one from each clinic, skip merrily through the sand and grit (that until
recently was a swamp!) with books full of numbers to one of the two base
sites. I then have to take the numbers and try and make sense of them. There
are a few problems with this.
Firstly, counting, as has be proved ad-nausem is not a strong point here. I
once made the mistake of trying to explain the concept of percentages.
Frankly I could have been reading a washing machine manual, backwards in
Serbo-Croatian for all the good it did.
Secondly, this is not the sort of environment that lends itself to intricate
and detailed compilation data collection. The fundamental problem is that
the clinics staff are not able to compile large amounts of information in a
monthly report and do the jobs they are supposed to be doing at the same
time. We just about manage the big three, malaria, pneumonia and diarrhoea,
but get into the finer detail and the whole thing comes down like a house of
numerical cards. The raw data provided is erratic. For some months I will
know how many pregnant women pitched up, for other months I won't. This
makes trying to identify patterns hopeless. Conversations with my bosses run
along the lines of;
Marcus: We had a large number of malaria cases in November.
Boss: Really? What about December?
Marcus: Erm…… (Starts to find floor very interesting, makes shape in sand
with shoe, avoids eye contact, or speech. Exits stage right.)
I have been sitting here all afternoon (yes I know, on a SUNDAY!) trying to
do the kind of mathematical gymnastics that would have had Archimedes
wondering if there wasn't some other topic to philosophise about. It's not
much improved after six hours of work. But at least the Excel columns are
now in different colours!!!! The guys who cracked the Enigma code are the
only beings on earth who can truly understand my pain!!!!!
Thankfully in just over twenty-four hours we are flying to an outreach site
to do some fun stuff. My brain may have stopped dribbling out of my ears by
then!
BREAKING NEWS. Just got an e-mail from my medical boss. There is a
nutritionist coming next month to assess our feeding program in the
outreach. Despite much effort our feeding program is an unmitigated disaster
on every conceivable level. I'm in so much trouble!!!!!!!
