This will not be my most elegant post. I think I have written a bit about the research
project I am helping with while I am here. But for clarity, the Rwandan
government asked CNLG to write a report on the psychosocial state of youth
survivors of the Genocide. Researchers went to the four provinces and Kigali to
conduct interviews with survivors. Now, we are reading the transcripts for
those interviews in a pilot study to begin the coding process. Coding is
reading through the transcripts and assigning themes to each section that draws
directly from the text. Last week we started reading the interview transcripts
individually and assigning themes based on our own reading of the text.
Everyone emailed me their themed interviews, I compiled them all into one
master list and an excel document organizing them (which took a very long
time), and now we are meeting as a team to decide which themes will become
codes.
Assigning themes is difficult in that one must
stay within what the respondent has said and leave out any analysis of meaning.
That comes later in the paper/report/article. Sitting six people down together to come to an agreement on one way to say up to six different interpretations
and that respects the data is long. And exhausting. It is one of the most
valuable experiences I have had in Rwanda and I am fortunate to be a part of it
but there are a few times that I have been much less than thrilled to be
working on the project. This was one of those times.
There are certain topics that are not discussed in
Rwanda. While coding, I read what I believed to be a blatant example of a
government worker using power to control a misinformed beneficiary. The
interviewee was threatened loss of benefits if they continued to cause trouble
for the government worker. The actions of the worker caused the interviewee to
report having fear that she would be chased from her house which was part of a
survivor village and legally belongs to her.
Another member of the research team wanted the
theme for this to be “lack of communication between service provider and beneficiary.”
Another suggested “bad communication.” We ended up settling on “Interactions
with some service providers causes fear of insecurity.” After a frustrating
discussion with the team I realized I was fighting a battle I could not win.
I want to move past this incident but various
questions keep surfacing. The interviews are in Kinyarwanda. If this blatant of
censorship and manipulation of data is occurring in the coding process, what
was left out completely? The government is not actually interested in improving services to survivors or else they would not be censoring the real problems survivors are facing. A survivor whose mother was raped and murdered in front of her lives next door to the perpetrator and she is forced to live in fear and silence because saying that she is afraid of her genocide perpetrator neighbor doesn't lend to reconciliation. How is Rwanda supposed to begin nation building when the government has created reconciliation villages as tourist attractions. Tourists can come and hear survivors and perpetrators tell their stories... exploiting survivors is not nation building it is repugnant.
The greater question is, should I be assisting in
research that I know is not accurate and is only furthering the government’s
agenda? Can I accept the little good that may come from the report if the
greater issues are being ignored?
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