Thursday, April 5, 2012

Research.

After I wrote that last blog post and I knew I would be going back to Haiti in the summer, I found myself tasked with determining what exactly I meant by returning to “work at Respire in a social work capacity.” I began talking to some of my professors about what that could look like and the answer that emerged was research. Yes, research. The very same thing that I whined about all through undergrad working in the psych lab. The reason I thought I could never put myself through a Ph.D. program. The bane of my existence while taking various required research courses… And so that is what I have been doing this semester (when I haven’t been studying or dealing with various client crises of course).

Let me explain a little bit about this process. There is this board at all major research institutions (and maybe some minor ones as well…) called the Institutional Review Board (IRB). You have to write a big formal proposal in which you talk about your study, do a lot of background research on it, talk about you’re target participants and all the ways you could potentially cause them psychological harm and how you're going to fix that, etc. You also must draft complicated consent forms and procedures, design a research instrument, and think about how you’re going to handle your data. Then when you think you’ve covered every single base and angle that could possibly exist, you submit your proposal to the IRB. And then you wait, and a month later or so, they say, “Yes, you can do this research after you make a million revisions to your proposal,” or “No, you can’t do the research even though you spent forever working to get to this point.” I am scared to death of the IRB.

So I was like, “Research! Alright, let’s do this!” And then I realized, I do not know what in the world I am doing. No clue. So immediately from the get-go I was forced into this spot of surrender. I knew I couldn’t do it; it would take a miracle. I would pray about it and be like, “Ha, ok God, I don’t know what I’m doing… its all you man.” The first time I met with Dr. F, the (widely published) professor who, for some completely unknown reason, agreed to sponsor my research she looked at me like, “What are you even doing in my office?” She asked me a thousand questions that I couldn’t answer. And the second time I went back thinking I was slightly more prepared, she tore up the ideas I brought to the table.

Finally spring break happened and I had a solid block of time to dive into this proposal. I spent everyday in the library for hours researching and refining my plans. Megan and I had spent a lot of time talking about it and I knew the project would center around collecting data on restavek children. A restavek is an “unpaid child servant living and working away from home.” Parents who can’t take care of a child send them to live with other families as a domestic servant in hopes that the child will have her basic needs met and the chance to go to school. Often these hopes are not realized and the child simply becomes a slave living in a distance relative or stranger’s home, doing all of the household work. A majority of the students in the school are restavek children, getting an education for the first time because they don’t have to worry about school fees or paying for a uniform.

I decided that I would conduct an exploratory study of the student population to learn more about common characteristics and experiences of children in the school. The goals of the study being: improve service provision to the children to enhance their educational and life outcomes, guide future program development, and get hard data on this population for advocacy purposes. I developed a structured interview to conduct individually with students at the school containing questions aimed at uncovering barriers and difficulties associated with the restavek experience.

The week after spring break, I nervously awaited meeting with Dr. F again. Anxiously, I went back into her office with all of the work I had done over the break. I expected her once again to tear it apart, just like the IRB would do. But instead, I was greeted with words like, “This is really good,” and, “Wow, you worked really hard on this.”
I felt like someone rolled a rock off of my chest. They were some of the best words I ever heard. If Dr. F thought this was good, maybe the IRB would think it was good too! This MIGHT actually work…

Everything continued along smashingly. I still sometimes thought I was completely crazy for taking this on, but I guess crazy is just how I've always operated. I made my final edits to all of my documents this past Sunday and met with Dr. F again today to final-finalize it before the deadline tomorrow, April 6 – aka what I have considered to be D-Day for several months now; and I was sittin’ pretty. I even got tickets to the Hornets v. Spurs game tomorrow night and had a great trip planned to celebrate finally turning in this stinkin’ thing.

But when I walked into Dr. F’s office, she immediately starting talking fast in a tone similar to the one she used at our first meeting and I knew something was wrong. It’s very weird that this all developed in the last week after I’ve worked on this proposal for an entire semester… but to make a long story short, it came to our attention that UT’s study abroad office has Haiti listed as a "category 3 restricted region" because traveling there is “extremely dangerous,” and heavily restricted by the university. And I have to get some kind of approval that will be tough to get because if I die or something, the school doesn’t want to deal with people saying, “Why did you even let students go there and do research in the first place?? Fools.” Which I get, but seriously, all of the dangerous/bad things happening to American citizens in Haiti probably happen to American citizens on a more regular basis in New Orleans… Anyway, after my denial turned to spouting clever ideas about how to get around whatever approval I needed, Dr. F was like, “Look, we can’t turn this in tomorrow. What do you want to do?” I was reeling. I was trying not to cry, and I wanted to vomit… and I told her as much. She kind of looked like she wanted to cry too but managed to laugh at my honesty. She then offered to run upstairs and ask the head of the social work research center her opinion on the matter. “Ok, back in 15!” she said as she ran out the door.

I went out into the room outside her office and plopped into a chair while the fate of my 50+ hours of work, blood, sweat, tears, anxiety, my very heart, was decided. I began praying my go-to prayer in Haiti when I see things I can't handle – Oh God… Oh God… Oh God Oh God Oh God Oh God. Then I heard my practice professor’s voice across the hall. I ran across the hall to her office because clearly, I couldn’t just sit alone while this was all happening. I tried to catch my breath and tell her what happened while fighting the tears with all my might. It could all be over in a matter of minutes. All that time and energy lost. But that didn’t hurt nearly as bad as possibility of losing the data that could be collected. The data that could be used for so much good. I also told my practice professor that I wanted to vomit and she offered to get me a bucket, ha.

A very LONG 15 minutes later, I walked back over to Dr. F’s office. She turned around in her important looking swivel desk chair in slow motion, like the bad guys in movies. And she was smiling? The social work research center lady said something along the lines of, “Yea maybe this could work… try for May submission.” So Dr. F was very excited that the study wasn’t dead in the water. I, on the other hand, continued to feel nauseous. To make another long story short, in spite of my high hopes, hard work, and quality research proposal, I will not be turning it in tomorrow. I will miss the April IRB deadline. Instead, during April – aka the month-long term paper and exam extravaganza – I will be fighting the terrifically large and scary bureaucracy that is UT in and effort to convince the right (and probably inaccessible) people that I need to do this and they should clear me to go. Mission: impossible.

After Dr. F and I wrapped up this disaster of a meeting during which I feel like the whole damn sky fell on my head, I walked out to my car. I got inside, plunked my head on the steering wheel, and bawled like a baby. I wept with complete abandon for the first time since I had surgery done on my leg in our bedroom in Gressier without any anesthesia… the very picture of pathetic and defeated. Ugh.

I went to a seder supper tonight and great deal of the symbolism had to do with contrasting slavery and freedom. I felt God telling me that I have to keep fighting slavery, have to keep fighting for freedom. And so I will. I guess I told this whole story (thanks, if you're still reading it) to just say,
I need your help. The odds are completely against me, but I guess they were from the start. I never had any illusions about being able to pull this project off by myself… I just want to humbly ask you to pray for some kind of miracle to happen, for this research to happen. For me to have faith in the face of rejection, should it not happen. And for freedom. Freedom for the trafficked and those held by the chains of oppression, freedom for people enslaved to money or drugs or an idea of beauty, freedom for the restavek children in Haiti.