wanderingjefe: Svay Rieng

Went into the field for the first time two weeks ago. Drove 3 hours down to Svay Rieng province. Drive was mostly uneventful, though was interrupted by a 20-minute wait to cross a big river. One would normally expect a bridge to get us across the river, but for some reason, this was all done by car ferry. The number of vendors knocking on the windows to try to sell us stuff while we waited was astounding. Sopheak bought a pommelo (huge grapefruit), which was absolutely fantastic, and Savath some corn (much less so—way overdone), but nobody ventured far enough to buy the fried crickets.

ferry loading

We arrived in Svay Rieng city (the provincial capital of Svay Rieng province), which was far from overwhelming, around noon and checked into our 5-star hotel which was more like a ½-star hotel. I definitely miss the IDEO expense budgets. . . I’ll post my user research report next weekend in which I’ll go through all the detail of what we saw, but for now. . . talked with a number of villagers (dry and wet latrine users & non-users), masons, ring producers and retailers. We had two groups of us out in the field in parallel, so we covered a lot of ground in three days—15 interviews plus transit time back and forth from Phnom Penh. . . was a bit of data overload.

Participant recruiting (normally the bane of any researcher) is remarkably simple here. We just walk around the villages until we see someone with a latrine that looks interesting then go up to their house and ask if they want to talk. Everyone spends 98% of their time outside, so they’re easy to find. And everyone has been ridiculously generous with their time, very open to talking about defecation (something with a pretty strong taboo back west) and really funny and enjoyable to interact with. Physically, the people are amazingly beautiful and have great character, especially the elderly and the children. My photography doesn’t do them great justice, but here are some of the people we met:

rice farmer

weaver

a man and his latrine

interview observers. . . don't see this normally

interviewing. . .

The interviews mostly last an hour and are almost completely out of my hands. They happen all in Khmer and for every 5 minutes of talking, I get about 30 seconds of translation. I’m not getting a lot of the nuance, but I am getting something. I’m counting on the rest of the team to bring out the nuanced insights during the discussions this week.

Some of the latrines we saw. . .