By Martha Henry

Tourists who visit Botswana’s scenic Okavango Delta rarely visit Shakawe, the most remote village participating in the Botswana Combination Prevention Project (BCPP), a large HIV-prevention trial of over 100,000 people. The results of the trial will likely end up as an orderly table published in a prestigious medical journal. Though the numbers in that table may provide much-needed evidence on how best to operate HIV/AIDS programs across the globe, they won’t show the hard work, mistakes, corrections, and triumphs of the field team. The data won’t reveal the thousands of daily interactions between the Research Assistants (RAs) and the villagers—the stories condensed into each data point. Continue reading →