Reflection on Research

During orientation, everyone told us that we would have to be patient because things would take time and that doing multiple things at once would be most effective. I didn’t realize just how slow things would be. There were articles after articles everyday because we were given a broad topic on intellectual disability which could be addressed through different factors. Because we were also at UTH two days out of the week, I felt like even though we were doing work, we weren’t doing much since most of it was reading and taking notes. It was also a bit difficult because most of the information we found wasn’t in Zambia, they were on other countries. The lack of information took some getting used to especially since the Wi-Fi was slow every morning at the office.

There is only so much information within Zambia about people with intellectual disabilities and none of them focus on specifically how to change people’s attitudes. Yes, there a ton of policies in place and the Persons with Disabilities Act passed in 2012 was a push in the right direction, but between policy and practice there is a large gap. People are still believing what they want and saying what they want despite what the law says. So the question became how can we change people’s attitudes? Having eight weeks didn’t seem like enough time to figure that out.

During the second or third week, hearing that some people were already having interviews with their stakeholders made me nervous. We had a brief list but we hadn’t set up any interviews. It also became a bit overwhelming when we started going in a direction different from Michelle. I realized that even though we had been gathering a lot of literature on disabilities from Zambia and other countries, we had focused a good chunk of our time on what Michelle wanted and pushed our paper planning to the side. On the bright side of it all though, we were able to use the survey Michelle to gain opinions on people with intellectual disabilities. Luckily we can use some of the data within our presentations.

Meeting with Marja during the third week made me feel better about our initial progress. We filled her in on how our research was going and what question we would focus on for the paper and about the struggle we were having with the limited information. Marja told us that in our case that was actually a good thing because any information we would bring to the table would be new and hopefully could be used by the SANI Foundation.

Not gonna lie but going to the offices at SANI every morning wore me out by the middle of the day so I had to push through to find more research for our paper. When we came back from Livingstone, Michelle told Erica and I that three new staff members had been hired so there wasn’t any space for us at the office and we would have to work from outside the office. I was honestly happy because Coffee Culture, Ms Beez Café as well as SAIPAR were really close to Abundant Life Fellowship. Because we also went to Livingstone and I was in the second Peace Corps trip, I had a good break from doing work and it helped jumpstart my motivation to interview organizations and continue our research.

One challenge was getting around when we started having interviews. We didn’t know exactly where certain organizations were so taking the minibus wasn’t an option. Luckily the taxi drivers either already knew where to go or asked for help from other taxi drivers on the way.

I’m happy with what we’ve done because we went through almost all of our interviews within one week, interviewing at least one organization everyday. We were also able to send out survey through ZGF in their newsletter and the emailing list through SANI. The good thing though is that for the paper, we were able to create a outline, which is something I usually do on campus since I struggle with papers. Our outline is subject to change, paragraphs might have to shift a bit, but otherwise having it helps us compile all the information we’ve gathered in these six weeks.