Porridge and statisticians

May 12th

Well, a very different day today. Made myself porridge for breakfast, but feels odd not doing it in a microwave! The oats are Kenyan, the powdered milk is Dutch, the sugar comes from Uganda, but it tastes fine.

At the office I just about finish with the census figures and I’m contemplating an early lunch when this guy comes in and introduces himself as the chief statistician for the whole District. He wants us to work together on the presentation of census data for all the District management team. He’s got the know-how in terms of statistics and he’s also not bad at presentations – graphs etc; I’ve got the educational background and can tell him what data we need to bring out. We get started, then go for a late lunch, and are still hard at it an hour after normal office finishing time.

Suddenly, too, I’m trying to find the French for phrases like “we need to get across the idea that while there may be inaccuracies in the data for an individual school, when we generalise the data for each secteur all the errors tend to cancel themselves out”….. They certainly didn’t teach me that at “A” level!

Suddenly everything’s going at full speed. It means I can’t take tomorrow off to go to Kigali, but I’ll try to find a way in the next few days.

A busy day, and a hole lot cooler weather. Once again lots of lightning flickering around in the evening, but no storm.

Best thing today – finding that someone’s at last taking a serious interest in what I’ve been doing for the past month and more!