"Canadians don't like monkey meat."

Happy Valentine's Day…from the kok village (tee hee hee).

So today is not exactly a happenin' day on the research front. We had been anxiously waiting to find out when we could get through our first few surveys, and as of 3:00 PM, our village guide/survey scheduler was nowhere to be found. The joys of research.

We had our focus group on Saturday. The MARATHON of a focus group - 6 hours (completely unintentional). We fed them lunch, coffee, and spent $20 on drinks to appease them at the end of it (which is a LOT here). The problem was that we had invited 10 people, but as this is a small village, 28 (!!!!) showed up. So our 5 litres of red wine no longer had the same pizzazz and the group was a bit frustrated with our village guide. Cait and I just wanted to get off to the best start that we could have, so we bought them some extra alcohol. It was a fantastically informative session (minus the fact that EVERYTHING was in Bulu and we got a tiny French translation of what was said… "in general") but our RAs took great notes so we've got those to rely on.

From the experience front: We did just have about 25 children on their way home from school outside our door standing and watching us. It's a somewhat awkward thing to work through, being that we don't want to be perceived as jerks and want people to like us. Yet the problem is that this is only our 6th day here. If we give ANYTHING to ANYONE, it's just the start of a giant snowball. And it's not like we are made of money and have access to replacement items here (plus, if we did go to the market, we would have to carry them on a motorbike).

As an aside, the key for the side door lock broke in half (likely because we have such strong arms) so our side door was unlocked until about 15 minutes ago when Vieux Kulu fixed it. Not that it is likely that anyone will take anything, but you know, we do have frequent visitors that are unaccustomed to our stuff. Case in point: today, as we were simply eating our lunch (around 1:30 PM) one of the village men (who we think just might be a tad crazy/definitely drunk) came into our house and sat down at the table with us. He didn't really have anything to say besides mentioning a previous researcher that was here and how he helped out. And last night, we had a very interesting experience that went something like this:

• lThree of the older women in the village came in ("Mes enfants!!!") and sat down.
• lThey asked what the laptop was ("You write things on there (notebook) and then put them in here (computer) and send them to Canada?")
• lCaitlin, at the recommendation of our lovely restaurateur friend Phi, mentioned that we don't like to eat meat (as we covered up our bag of beef jerky…oops!). This was an attempt to reduce the number of animals such as porcupines, hares, monkeys, mongooses, etc. that would be served to us over the next month.
• lDodged a bullet there for sure - one of the ladies responded with "Canadians don't like monkey meat." (WTF?!)
• lAnd then they asked for beer. We could not deliver, so they left.

The persistent audience is definitely something to get used to! Especially when communication is difficult…but alas, we recognize that it is not every day that people here see "les blanches." We are the dancing elephants at the circus, ladies and gentlemen!