Day 5

I can't believe it, but I think everything is going to work out.

My husband would say "of course it will work out!" but he has a lot more faith in me than I do.

So it's been an extremely challenging week, but it looks like, act of God notwithstanding, we will finish data collection tomorrow and be on our way home Saturday.

It was a little touch and go yesterday, when I got a call from one of our teams, at 8 o'clock at night, saying they were stuck in the mountains, the four-wheel drive wasn't working, and could we send a car to tow them out.

Oh, and they were three hours away, on the Mozambique border.

Unfortunately for them, we have a pretty strict policy about taking cars out after dark, so we told them they would have to go to the nearest village and try to find a place to stay. I was super stressed, because sending a car to tow them out the next day was going to set us back a full day of data collection.

Fortunately for the team, they happened to find the chief when they went to the village, who showed them an alternate route through Mozambique. They got in to town around 11:30 last night, much to my relief. The teams went out again as planned (we let the team that got lost last night rest a bit first. I'm not heartless) and they pulled through and visited lots of villages today. Tomorrow we have 8 villages to go to, but they are all close to town, and we should finish up well before dark.

Man, will I be happy to get out of this heat! It was about 100 degrees today, and the A/C kept going out. I am melting. I can only imagine what it was like for the poor suckers, oops, I mean survey enumerators, who were out wakling around collecting data in it!

And with that said, the last set uf suckers is here, which means I can go home before 8PM for the first time all week.

Just one more day!