A Chat with Jackie

Two days ago, I had the opportunity to chat with Jackie who went to South Africa last year and studied a topic similar to mine. She gave me some good advice about where to steer my research and what things I should be focusing on now, and what things I shouldn't be stressing about yet.

**disclaimer: I am going off of my memory from two days ago (yes, I should have taken notes sooner than now), so if I misquote Jackie, I apologize in advance**

Jackie's recommendations were that I focus on researching the state of my topic in South Africa right now. She also said that before she left, she did a lot of reading on the history of her health issue in South Africa and how it had been handled throughout the years. She felt that this was less helpful, but so far, I haven't done any of that. Up to this point, I have been focusing solely on scientific journals to learn about the pathology of HIV and how it is connected with nutrition. I think this has been useful for helping me to understand what the problem is and what I will be dealing with when I get there, but after a while, scientific journals all start sounding the same, and their research is so disconnected from any human element that a lot of it is hard to apply to what it is I will be doing over there. So, I think I am going to take a break from journals for a while and start reading some books and looking at current statistics about the state of malnutrition in East London.

Another thing that Jackie encouraged me to do in South Africa, is to gather data on the race/ethnicity of the people I interview. Even though she knew that 99% of the people she talked to were black, Jackie has been unable to draw in conclusions concerning race in her write-up because she was unable to collect data due to the sensitivity of her topic. She also said that most of the questions she wrote for her interviews and focus groups were written after she got to South Africa, because the way people talk about health issues in South Africa is completely different than the way we talk about them here. In order to be sensitive, Jackie had to learn these nuances first. That helped me to relax a little bit, knowing that I don't have to have everything set in stone before I get there.