Working! again. Is tiresome

Gah working is so boring! I have worked all day so well and just had to leave at 2 something, and run away and socialise online.

Was driving me potty. Am quite restless today which is fairly usual considering I worked hard and sat still for two whole days. Am going back up now, I am motoring through these reports and getting lots of info that I wanted to get so all good. Hope to have the reports all finished and read by the end of next week - with a weekend off thrown in. Can't be bad!

Have a horrible headache. Think may be either the weather (even though is lovely and sunny and hot it is quite 'heavy') or the Bean. Am giving up being so incredibly and stoically brave and getting out the paracetemol. No! I give in.

Heard from my fantastic Research Assistant! Who has done no research and is waiting for me to send him a tape recorder I think, as he asked if I had one yet. I certainly do, it is staring me right in the face as we speak but I am not posting it to India! How silly, it would a) be stolen or b) arrive after me! So I told him AGAIN to go and get one and I will reimburse him, or, I gave in and told him to hold his horses and wait till I come to India when he can borrow mine. I will probably buy him his own cheap one as bizarrley I am quite attached to mine even though I hate whatever it stands for (interviews yuk) and have hardly used it. But it's what it stands for - fieldwork and adventure and stuff. Hmmmm.

Not starting the work until I am there almost defeats the object but does mean we can talk through face-to-face what I want him to do, I am sure he probably doesn't know. Considering he thinks I am posting him a tape recorder when I explicitly asked if he could buy one and I will pay for it to which he never relpied (he never answers questions which is quite troublesome), and since he asks me every email when I am coming to India, to which I answer the 17 July as if it is the first time. Oh lordy. Well, I don't mind really, I have no expectations from this arrangemnt and the more confuddled and weird it is getting the better really. It was too good to be true that they would all be done and dusted by now. Will be good to be there as the interviews are unfolding, will give me a good focus each day and I can manipulate the questions according to the info as time goes on. Yes, so not so bad. Am still not going to the actual interviews though, am *sure* he will cope, and it really would be better to have a group acting like friends together, chatting, instead of interviews with the White NGO Worker watching and evaluating in the corner (yes me, even though am not an NGO worker, they will not believe me, trust me).

Is just a shame I think that he has this opportunity to take the research and run with it, to influence what the focus is, the questions, who is asked and why... on a project that he does all the time - it is his job, his charity's life. Yet there is none of it. He just takes what I say as 'right' and has no desire for any input at all, even though he is a social worker in the area and cares about it, is passionate about the aid-effort being inept, and wants to be a PhD student in the UK. I wonder if it resembles some kind of skewed power relationship or whether he really just doesn't care or thinks my project is fine. I don't know. But 'participatory' research is really quite complicated.

Back to reading! No sun for I, nay.

x J