To Do

A random list of weird and/or difficult tasks on my plate (some successful thankfully):

- Talking with Schering Finland to import 200 units of implant contraceptive into Zambia via NGO and Zambia bureaucracy
- Making numerous, frustrating trips to the "poison board" (i.e. Zambia's Pharmaceutical Regulatory Authority) to wrestle an approval for import from them
- Meeting with NGO directors to push through a legal contract between Harvard and the partner NGO because the study ran out of money and needed a new contract
- Purchasing hundreds of chitenges, 1,440 condoms, and prepaid talk time
- Negotiating salary arguments/discussions with the data collectors and community health workers working for the study
- Trying to minimize the community's fears that our data collecting teams are "Satanists"
- Buying pregnancy tests, gloves, bleach, and sterile solution for the surgical insertion of Jadelle implant contraceptive
- Constant monitoring of staff. There's no such thing as being too anal in the field. Some version of Murphy's law is at work here -- if you don't check on the work, it won't be done... or at least it won't be done well.
- Working 7 days a week to reach as many women as possible