Once a month, or rather, every full moon, Sinhalese Buddhists in Sri Lanka celebrate Poya Day. It’s a national holiday, so lots of places are shut for the day, including the factory. If I was in Ampara, I might see the empty factory floor, the machines sitting quietly, the fans immobile. But I’m not in Ampara. I’m running days behind schedule for a multitude of little reasons, from visa implications to accommodation availability. Frustrating as it is to still be in Colombo, it did mean I had some time yesterday to bury my head in the National Archives, and I would have gone again today had it not been for Poya Day.
Thankfully, I’m at last going to Ampara tomorrow, which will leave me with about three full days there before I’ll have to come back to Colombo for my flight home! I’m going to have to be super organised. I would still like to try the ‘ideal community’ activity with a group or two in the factory, and a peacebuilding organisation in the area are keen to meet up. I had hoped to conduct some questionnaires, but now with the time constraints I’m not sure that I’ll be able to get translation, distribution and collection done in time. I’ll talk to Padma in HR about it. Time is one of the biggest constraints in social research, and very often it is almost entirely out of the researcher’s hands. This means I have to be absolutely on the ball in the next few days, and hope that people in the factory aren’t too busy so I can draw in a lot of help!
I mentioned in a previous post that I’ve been doing lots of shopping – a lot of this has been purchasing thank you gifts for participants of my mapping sessions. It’s taken forever, but I’ve managed to find little gift bags and tiny little elephants, and I’ll be filling them up with sweets and chocolates when I reach Ampara. I’ve also been printing out lots and lots of photos, so some of these will be going into relevant gift bags.
I’m just trying, in my head (and now on here too), to establish my plan of action over the next few days!
Provisionally, it looks a little like this:
Friday:
- Travel to Ampara by bus, via Kandy – arrive late afternoon
- Go shopping for sweets and chocolates with which to fill gift bags, and a couple of large tins of biscuits for Padma (translator) and Sanjeewa (photographer). Also buy Coca-Cola to satisfy my new-found dependence on the stuff…
- Ring the local peacebuilding group to organise a meeting
- Draw a map of the factory, line by line, section by section, in preparation of mapping the locations of workers of different ethnicities
Saturday:
- Go in to see all the girls, and distribute gift bags.
- Talk to Padma and Dhama Sir about the possibility of holding a couple of focus groups with some of the staff – ‘ideal community’ session
- If possible, hold a focus group today
- More participant observations during tea break – I’ll join the girls for this
- Talk to Padma about translating questionnaires – Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim?
- Mapping the factory floor in terms of ethnicity
Sunday:
- Hopefully go to Thirrokovil to meet with the peacebuilding group and hold an interview or focus group
- Go to the factory for tea break, and if possible, another focus group (if factory open)
- Distribute questionnaires (very tentative, and if factory open)
- Mapping the factory floor in terms of ethnicity (if factory open)
Monday:
- Focus group in factory
- Distribute questionnaires (very tentative)
- Tea break and participant observation
- Mapping the factory floor in terms of ethnicity
Tuesday:
- Any final interviews, another focus group if time
- Collect the questionnaires (if any at all completed)
- Farewells!
- Fly back to Colombo
Wednesday:
- Some photocopying at the archives
- And probably more shopping…
If this all goes to plan, it will be a miracle.
Here goes nothing…
Sri Lanka: A Research Project 