Cozy and foresty weekend

I have spent the weekend in a wonderful Soviet apartment very similar to my grandfather's, within a funny triple-generation collection of people: me, Vasilii Timofejivich (an elderly military "razvetchik" - or, more bluntly, spy) who tells many long World War II stories replete with numerous historical and tactical details; Lyuba, his daughter's friend, who has been taking care of him while his daughter is away in Moscow; and me. Lyuba is beautiful and kind and religious, a woman in her forties from Samara (a small city in the South of Russia, where, she told me, people talk on public transportation - unlike here and in Moscow and more than in Boston - and elderly women pull out tomatoes that they just bought at the market and announce to all of the strangers on the tram how good the price was, and everyone breaks out into amazement and discussion). It feels like she is somewhere between my sister, friend, aunt and guardian angel. She even protects me from bee stings, apparently, because it was after we parted for her to go to work (after a tour of Riga-center during her lunch break) that a bee appeared in my hair and stung me! Also she cooks amazing kotleta (chicken patties), by the smell of them, and liskichki ("fox mushrooms") with sour cream, happily consumes my exotic salads and less exotic borsch and hachipoori (Georgian cheese pie), and generally makes everyone laugh and feel energetic. She is tall and elegant and has freckles and very young dark eyes, and short dark hair, like my grandmother's. And Vasilii Timofejivich is very small, almost all bones and wrinkly skin, like a true very elderly man, and with a wide jaw and tiny dark eyes, which usually look away when he talks. He moves slowly, with frailty, and never complains. We went for walks along the Soviet "dvory," parks, between the apartment buildings, and to the forest nearby (when we got caught in cold rain from a storm on the sea), and watched Russian TV (with a highlight of an excellent Kabzon concert (kind of the Russian Frank Sinatra, also with mafia ties, I think) with accompaniment from the Russian military chorus (choir?), and talked a lot, and went to bed late.

So I don't have actual Riga/Latvia impressions, since Imanta, the neighborhood where Vasilii Timofejivich lives, is almost totally Russian in population and very typically Soviet in appearance. And our plans to go to the famed Baltic Sea resort, Jurmala, got derailed because of the storm.

Today Vasilii Timofejivich's other daughter, who is my mother's childhood friend and whom she hasn't seen in sixteen (?) years, arrives from France. And so again my "family" will change and very likely there will be a rigorous analysis of the similarities between my and my mom. She is also very amazed that I cook, and so I plan to live up to her expectations and make more soup.

But first I would like to solicit some research advice, in case anyone has any thoughts on the following questions. (Optional reading!! Very tedious!! Though, to me, obviously interesting!) My project is to interview former and current, non-infectious tuberculosis (TB) patients to collect oral histories of having TB and to try to determine how to improve patient adherence to treatment. If people don't complete the treatment regimen, then they don't get cured and keep on infecting people, and, even more seriously, develop drug resistance, which makes TB more difficult or even impossible to treat, and which they continue to pass on to other people. My plan at the moment is to contact current patients through their doctors, and to find past patients through newspaper advertisements. The second part I am not sure about: I haven't yet checked how expensive it is, and I am not sure if there is a newspaper that past TB patients will be likely to read, whether a lot of people will respond (TB has a stigma and generally is an unpleasant experience. The other way of finding past patients is from their records, but I have ethical concerns about this. Though researchers can technically be allowed to access patient records, patients expect that no one will see their records and will never be able to trace them to their records. I will be acting directly in contradiction to this trust. It will also be harder to get Ethics Committee approval for access to patient records, though probably they will give it. Also I am not even sure whether to interview only one group - just past or just current - though I am leaning to working with both. Current patients are much easier to access, but I may have to wear a mask with them, which will make the interview significantly more awkward and less productive. They have a better memory of the experience, since it's still happening, but they will probably be more optimistically biased because they are nearing the end of treatment and because they may fear speaking critically of their current doctors. Past patients may not remember as well, and may not want to try to remember. Okay that's a lot and my battery time is almost over! But any thoughts are very welcome. I am just not sure what's better. Oh and one more issue, though I am not sure that anyone is familiar with this concept. I am struggling with how to make my project community-participatory, in the interests of the patients. Traditionally this means working together with the "subjects" to develop the project, but I have no idea how to do this in my case.