Calling on help from back home, Tuesday meetings, and the retro, 70's, stuntman, red, indie, sunglasses!

The week has got quite a bit better. I think on Wednesday I'd just hit a real low. I read through my Sheffield university sample size course notes as a refresher. The key message is to keep sample size calculations simple. Even if the main analysis is a complex logistic regression, or survival analysis. This helped me focus with the “Time to event” problem. It turned out, using 80% power, and a 5% type I error rate, that the sample size was too big to recruit in such a short timeframe, so in the end I asked the student what would be a logistically feasible sample size (she was looking at measuring the adherence to scheduled Well Child Care (i.e. success is measured as the proportion of mothers and babies that are compliant on a monthly basis) as a primary objectives, and a secondary objective of factors motivating mothers to turn up for scheduled clinic visits. As an exploratory objective, does the mother receive the correct services at each visit? If the mother does not receive the correct services, does this influence whether she drops out or not?). We resolved the problem, and with 400 patients, we estimated the precision that we were likely to see around the point estimate.

I came to realise that the regular Tuesday meetings just aren’t working (or I am getting missed off the communication channels.)? I was the only one to turn up at 7am this week. Is this the normal way of working here? The focus of the Tuesday meetings is to start writing the research papers. I should probably say something, otherwise we won’t get anything achieved.

One of the children at the Sally Test Paediatric Centre

This morning (Saturday), I went to the Sally Test Paediatric centre. There weren’t many children there. I played the memory game (involved turning all the cards face down, and trying to find pairs) with the 4 children there. Tom*, one of the teaching assistants came over with Charlotte*, whose just over a year old. She was very unbalanced on her feet. I later learned that she has cerebral palsy, and can’t talk. She fell asleep in Tom’s* arms. I spoke to Tom* for quite some time. He told me about the politics, and the “stolen elections” in 2008. The rioting sounded horrific here. He asked me about politics back home, and also the schooling system, which, sounds a little different to the Kenyan system. Here, the students study at primary school for 8 years, then secondary for 4years, where they do their Kenyan Secondary Certificate of Education. There is no A-Level equivalent before University (which is for 4 years). My colleague is actually planning to put her daughter through the British schooling system here because she says it’s more student focused, whereas the Kenyan system is more curriculum based.

One of the children at the Sally Test Paediatric Centre

Went up to the swimming pool to give the pool attendants daughter a French lesson. The pool attendant said she’d missed me, and wondered where I’d been – I didn’t realise this had turned into a business agreement! Met up with Mira and Mike in town for lunch…but sizzler’s was closed. Was gutted as wanted to try their milkshakes. We tried the Better Health, a vegetarian cafe that my colleague had recommended,  in Zion Mall but it was also closed :( I was surprised, being the weekend, I thought this was when they would make most of their business? Perhaps the owners are from the Kikuyu tribe whose religious day is a Saturday? So we ended up in Klique. We sat by the window and people watched. There was a man cycling with about 20 live chickens attached to his bike! Poor birds would be in for a bumpy ride!  It was ages before our food arrived, but we had an order of masala chips, which made it worth the wait. Mike headed home, whilst me and Mira went up to the Nakamatt's, the supermarket. Mira tried on some big retro 70s stuntman red indie sunglasses. I couldn't stop laughing, as I thought it was a joke, but she was actually serious about buying them – I wish I had a picture to show you. Perhaps I'm just out of touch with fashion..!? Mira – if you're reading this, you know i'm just kidding! The rain came on, pretty bad so got soaked, and Mira was almost talked into buying a 350KS Umbrella with the US flag on from a street seller.

*I’ve changed the names in this posting