October 15

Day 12 in Kaduna, and my project is slowly starting to swing into action. I had my first research assistant meeting today, in one of the rooms I've rented in a small development NGO office at the center of town. Right now, my staff is five people, though I'm hoping to expand to eight by the time we start the survey. This morning, we introduced ourselves to each other and then we did our own "focus-group-discussion" (FGD) of my questionnaire. The feedback from my RAs was incredibly thorough and I am going to make some revisions based on their comments. We also spent a good deal of time pouring over my huge Kaduna map and weighing the pros and cons of different neigbhorhoods to sample from. There is consensus on the handful of areas worst-affected by the 2000 riots, and that is where we plan to sample from first. We also divided up the task of visiting community leaders over the next few days to gain permission to work in their areas over the next six weeks. All in all, the level of discussion was extremely high, and everyone is in good spirits about the project.

I also traveled up to Kaduna North to visit Arewa House - a think-tank associated with Ahmadu Bello University (one of the best universities in northern Nigeria), to discuss my research plans, and ask for a letter of affiliation for the RAs to carry with them. To my surprise, I was able to see the director right away, who offered me tea and gave me a 30 minute lecture on why he thinks the riots took place ("it is not about religion, you see, but it is all about uneven economic development"). But he took my project very seriously, gave me lots of advice about what kinds of permission to seek, and even read through my questionnaire and gave me some solid feedback. And he wrote me a letter on the spot! I couldn't believe it. My typical experience with requests like this is that they take days, or even weeks, to go through.

From here, we spend the next few days introducing ourselves to district heads in the neighborhoods where we want to work, and on Friday I'm leading a full-day RA training, where we will go over human subjects/IRB guidelines and practice administering the survey. I don't have much experience managing people, so it will be interesting to see how things turn out.

Otherwise, life has been fairly quiet here. The most exciting thing that's happened recently is that Kwase asked me to come to church with her, so I came along yesterday. It was quite an experience. She attends the Evangelical Church of West Africa (ECWA), an extremely conservative church, as far as I could tell, as I had to cover my head. Kwase gave me a scarf which I tied around my head babushka-style. The congregation was huge - at least 500 people. To my great embarrassment, I was asked to stand up to be welcomed by the pastor. I also had to stand up before communion, and was asked by the pastor through his booming microphone-enhanced voice, something like "were you ah-massed?" I started at him awkwardly in front of the entire crowd, until I eventually figured out that he was asking me if I was baptised by *immersion* in water. Although technically I think I just had some water sprinkled on my head when I was a baby, I nodded vigorously, and he let me sit down and eat the square of bread in peace.

Most interestingly, though, at the end of the service, the pastor made an annoucement based on breaking news he had just received. The evening before, a Christian had allegedly been murdered by several Muslims in a rough part of town after an argument got out of control. The pastor wasted no time giving the details of the incident to the visibly upset audience and urged his parishoners to be very cautious about where they walk at night. It was interesting to me to see the church used to give information about sectarian violence. While this pastor was very restrained, I couldn't help but wonder if other pastors were giving a less restrained message elsewhere around town.