Irrelevant

My seventh reflection.

Last week I interviewed a young woman in her home.  We were seated on a red velvet sofa in front of an extremely loud television turned to Rod Stewart music videos, and my repeated attempts to complete the survey were stymied by the barking dogs, hollering roosters, sobbing babies, meddling mothers, and curious fathers that were competing for the lender’s attention.  She seemed entirely disengaged until I asked if anyone had defaulted on a loan recently.

Yes!, she said, leaning in closer.  Five months ago the lender had given some money to another girl who said she was a friend, but then the girl had found a foreign boyfriend, gotten addicted to drugs and disappeared.  The lender had taken the girl’s sister to court.  The sisters agreed to cover the debt, but then from out of nowhere the girl reappeared and mysteriously had enough money to pay off the loan.

This was interesting, but the problem is that there’s no code for “back-stabbing friends who use the loan to buy drugs for their expat boyfriends and then magically redeem themselves”  on my data entry sheet.  It's a dilemma I face daily in the field.  I know exactly what my bosses want, clear-cut data, and I start every interview with the full intention of getting it; after a few minutes, though, I just want to kick back and listen to the  lenders' insane stories.  One man volunteered that he has an American client who takes out loans to support his three Filipino girlfriends and all their kids.  That's awful, I said.  Now, tell me more.

I like to think that these stories are still valuable data, perhaps just a little more nuanced and flavorful than most, but I know that (outside of this blog) most of them will never be heard.  More than twenty interns have participated in this research project over a three-year period.  I’m sure that all of us have encountered several bizarre stories, but that’s exactly the problem: at some point it becomes impossible to discern any sort of overarching narrative from such an enormous mosaic.  The reason the survey includes such boring, mundane information is because that’s the sort of data that can be processed, analyzed, and then acted upon.  It’s interesting to know that one lender in the Philippines has twenty little Chihuahua mutts; it does not, however, really suggest any policy reform.  

The pictures come from one of my favorite TV channels, which plays karaoke videos of pop songs paired with random stock footage.