Buster the Puppy

Today we had another round of focus groups. We started around 10, with 7 women. About halfway through, at around 10:30, another 10 women showed up. They run on super IST time- we had told them to come at 9! We ended up finishing the first group of 7 women, then did another focus group with the 10 women. Both groups went well, and we'll eventually find out what they're saying. Translating has been taking a really long time because Family Health Ministries wants every single word of what was said. This is problematic because during the men's focus group last week, the first 20-30 minutes was totally irrelevant. A bunch of the men were saying things that didn't answer our questions, and they were asking us all kinds of random things. Still, we were told that we had to translate that, which is kind of frustrating because I doubt anyone will get anything of value out of that and it's time consuming. Anyways, during the focus group, my friend Amber and I befriended a little puppy. This puppy lives at Mon P'tit Village, the school/activity center where we had our focus group. He had lots of little brothers and sisters but they all died :( What we heard is that one of the puppies accidentally bit the mother while drinking milk from her so she stopped feeding her babies milk, so they all died. The only one left drinks milk from another mother dog that lives there, but even she runs away while he's trying to get milk. Amber and I decided to name the puppy Buster and we fed him nutrigrain bars and rice krispy treats and he seemed to like it. Then, during the focus group, he fell asleep on our water cooler bag and was kind of shivering. He looked so cute and peaceful, so we put an old sheet that we had for people to sit on over him. We felt bad that we couldn't touch him, but we weren't sure if he had his vaccinations and he looked like he had fleas. But he was still really cute! We felt so bad when we had to wake him up and take his bed away from him. Hopefully we can let him nap on the bag again tomorrow when we go for the men's focus group!

Buster the puppy!