One of the problems related to the difficulties of recruitment of children in the research and exclusion of some participants. Before we commenced the actual data collection, the NGO field officers took us on a familiarisation tour of the study area during the first week. We walked past deserted households whose family members have died of HIV/AIDS. We visited the terminally ill suffering from HIV/AIDS related illnesses. We discovered that both the patients and the carers were in denial as they blamed the illness
on witchcraft. We walked past households with children who lived alone during the week because the parent lives on nearby farms where they work and ‘live in’ with boyfriends. We were also shown many grandmother/orphan households and households where orphaned children [mostly girls] had run away from physical abuse by relatives because they were accused of engaging in prostitution. It was during the tour and the hanging out that we discovered some CHHs that had been excluded in the selection process. One of the households contained a single ten-year-old boy who lived alone, but he left a few days later to live with a grandparent outside the study area. Another household comprised a young girl aged twenty with two children, and cared for two young sisters aged 16 and 11 years. I intended to include her in the sample because she went through the process of being a child head and had the two children with different men after the deaths of the parents. At the time of the study the younger pregnant sister ‘eloped’ but we understand the unemployed guy was denying paternity. Unfortunately the child head dropped from the research at a later because she went to work on the farms daily. This could have been an interesting household because it would reflect the gender dimensions in the experiences of the orphans. The reasons why the above households were excluded were never clear. I had relied too much on the NGO and failed to involve the village heads and some villagers in the identification process. I regard this as a learning process not to entirely depend on the local NGO staff in sample selection as they served their own interests. There was no solution to this (making sure that all orphans were included) as involving village heads could lead to a similar problem. For example one village head stated that he disliked one of the orphans for his bad behaviour. He questioned why we included him in the sample.
Despite the fact that interaction and observation provided rich detailed data, there were problems related to confidentiality. Maintaining a high level of privacy at both the household and community level was crucial in this study. At the household level, sibling sometimes gossiped about each other and asked us not to mention anything they would have told us (Punch, 2001b). Sometimes what was supposed to be confidential information was revealed in a humorous manner (in the presence of the other siblings)
providing an insight into sibling dynamics and to uncover individual characteristics (in this case thief) as shown in the following excerpt during observation
Chenjerai said to us, [In the presence of the older brother, Mbadzu, who was presumed to be a thief]“ Why do you always carry your bags. Are you afraid that someone will search your bags and steal from you.”[Laughing]
Later [in the absence of the accused and on our way to fetch water from the borehole].”Never [with emphasis] leave your bags unattended. You will find everything gone. That’s his nature [to steal]. I am sure he stole from someone in Harare. Why is he here? I do not even trust him with my clothes. Last time he took my jean trousers with him.
Some of the community members became spontaneous informants and we were amazed at the level of gossip among the adult women who wanted to know our daily programme, what we did with the children or what we ate at the children’s households. I had to abide by the code of conduct relating to confidentiality. It was difficult because having failed to get information from me; some villagers manipulated the children and harassed them to reveal what we discussed. On one occasion we witnessed a neighbour [a member of NGO staff] visiting one of the household we were studying early in the morning at around 7 a.m. She wanted to know from the child head the questions we asked and if we had given the household food or non food items. We heard her say that she found us too secretive and she just did not understand us. I could not blame her given the current political situation where strangers are viewed suspiciously and that we could belong to the opposition party as we came from Harare. The whole incident was embarrassing because it affected everyone one involved in the project (the child subject, the researcher, the NGO field officers and the NGO’s work activities). In the end the woman took days off from work and never came to visit us again (as she often had done previously) before we left the area. This happened a week before we were due to leave the field. Such people have potential to influence children not to participate in research. I felt that the woman held a position of power in the community and abused it to harass the child. However, the child perceived this as a moment of excitement as it humiliated the influential villager. It was a solution to the harassment and this signalled the end of the visits until we left the community. Reflecting on this it raises two issues: How researchers can protect children during the research process. It also raises generally questions about how children are
vulnerable to this kind of manipulation from community figures whose role is to oversee and help these children. Such behaviour could have implications for community involvement in orphan care programmes. This was not a simple case because I felt I had no position to protect the child head. Although at first I felt I was an insider by being virtue of having grown up in the country and considered myself to be Shona, the incident made me feel like an outsider. I did not want to be entangled in the village gossip, and I never reported the incident to the village head or the NGO director, but I did with one of the NGO field officers.