The meandering interviewer

For the last three days I have been going out to do interviews. Wait. It is more accurate to say that I have been going out to try to do interviews. There hasn't been an avalanche of information, if you get my drift. 3 days 5 interviews. To be honest it is about what I expected. Data collection is a slow, difficult process. Out of the 172 cases that I have (identified by the Ministry of Health) 51 had addresses. Those 51 don't always have complete addresses of course. Several are a street with just the block number. Others list there address as A.H. Vate Manrique. Luckily A.H. Vate Manrique is on my map. Unluckily it seems to indicate an entire neighborhood of the city. I have been told that it stands for Asociacion Humano - I won't insult your intelligence this time, I'm pretty sure you can figure out the translation. I can only guess how many people are a part of this association. Also sometimes people put down an address that doesn't exist. Or they put down the address of someplace where people don't live (my favorites so far: medical center and apostolic church). I don't think this is any more difficult than tracking down migrant farm workers in Traverse City, but at least then I didn't have to walk everywhere. Today my dogs were barking pretty bad so I thought it would be a good idea to sit down, put my feet up, and catch up on some paperwork. I went into this park and sat on a bench. I was immediately surrounded by 10 kids. They were all boys with ages ranging from 5-12. They were completely fascinated by me and stayed even if I wasn't talking to them. After talking to the boys for a minute about 10 more girls showed up. They didn't stay long as I think they were bored with me. All of the kids wanted to show me how they could count to 5 in English. Which they did over, and over, and over. One kid, the oldest but quieter than the rest, asked me if I was a missionary. He seemed almost nervous when he asked. After almost laughing out loud I assured him that I was not, in fact, a missionary. When I told them I was asking questions about Dengue half of them said that they had it before. I don't know this for a fact, but I have a pretty good feeling that the number of reported Dengue cases is hugely different from the number of actual cases. It would be interesting to go around and ask every person in Chulucanas if they had experienced symptoms of Dengue Fever this year and then take a blood sample to check for recent infection, just to see if the Ministry's data is anywhere near accurate. My guess is that it wouldn't even be close. But that's life and I have to worry about the problem at hand. Like how to find people when they don't give their address.