Today I did something quite brilliant and I want to crow about it a bit.
In a particular coalition project on dengue prevention, one of the coalition partners left rather abruptly and in an unpleasant manner. This partner was our main community link, having been embedded in that community for years and years. With their departure, a lot of the other work, including ours, was adversely impacted.
To complete the requirements of the project, I need to get the data of 100 people in about a week. This is not just surveys, but also blood tests. With our access to apartments, community leaders, labour unions etc completely cut off, I was getting really jittery about being about to finish this thing. I had done a lot of nifty Googling and found other community partners, but things were moving too slowly.
Last night I decided that the only way to solve this was to go to the community and walk around the area a bit and I hoped that once I saw things with my own eyes and talked to a few people, I would get some ideas. Well, long and short of it is, I did and I got :)
First, there was a police station as soon as one enters the ward. I spoke to the constables and the inspector and they agreed to have us come by next week for the surveys and tests! I think i should get atleast 20 -25 ppl here during the 90m they have given us.
Next, I realized that places of worship could be other potential areas and tracked down some mosques, temples and churches. However, when today was Fri, and the mosques were busy; the temples were all closed in the afternoon and my personal bet of churches working out (since a lot of laborers in the area are from Tamil Nadu and most of them tend to be Christians) didn't really materialize.
I then checked out the banks and have another appointment for testing next week...I hope to get atleast 30-40 there. Here's a funny thing- one may not have access to the large apartment complexes for such surveillance work, but one can catch the same people at the public institutions (like banks) where most of them conduct their business... of course, nobody goes to a physical bank anymore. Shopping malls or neighborhood supermarkets might work even better, but I don't think it's a good idea to mix up blood collection with food.
Finally, I spoke to shopkeepers, telling them about what we are doing and have the phone number of one of the owners of a most promising place to request permission- the shop faces a slum with a lot of foot and vehicular traffic, it has the Indian postal service branch above it and the fire brigade a few feet away. I think I should be able to get the remainder of ppl, if the owner allows us.
I walked around for nearly 3 hours. Spoke to a lot of people. My key learnings have been:
A) nothing can beat the sheer efficiency of personally going to a place and meeting people face to face when one wants to do community engagement projects.
B) my title helped :)
C) the name of BBMP was like magic- this project is supported by the municipality and so leading the conversation with that really opened a lot of doors... it does indicate a level of trust with the govt that is good to observe.
I hope next week by this time, I should have not only met but exceeded the expectations of the project!
