{Work} Butterfly Project

Doing some theme and word mapping for
Butterfly research data analysis

We have started writing blog posts through our Canadian sending agency, Love Global Foundation. For more on what we're doing in Cambodia, previous posts, and to follow our Love Global blog and support our work, go to http://www.loveglobal.com/project/project.aspx?asset=1057.

Charlie has told you a little about his work with Chab Dai, and now that I am back at work, the little one is taken care of by a wonderful new nanny, and I am immersing myself in a new project, I will try to explain my role with Chab Dai over the next few posts.

After going back and forth about everything I will be doing with Chab Dai here in Cambodia, my job title was summed up as "Staff Capacity Development." This includes a whole lot of different tasks and projects, so for now I will explain what I will be involved with for the next couple months.

The Butterfly Project is a 10-year longitudinal research study on reintegration of survivors of human trafficking. The study "aims to better understand the experiences of survivors of abuse who have been reintegrated back into society after rehabilitation. Researchers will follow victims as they become survivors starting from the time they are in the aftercare program. The purpose will be to ‘hear’ from the survivors themselves, about their lives, understandings and experiences so their voices can contribute towards a greater understanding of the complexities of (re-)integration."

We are coming to the end of the 3rd year in the research so, as you can imagine, I am on a steep learning curve and trying to catch up on three years of findings! Every year, Chab Dai publishes an annual progress report on the findings from that year. My role in the Butterfly team is to help with data analysis for this year's findings, train and support the research team in writing a portion of the literature review, bring all the quantitative and qualitative data together into thematic sections and edit the final report. I am diving right in, as you can see!

I'm really excited about this project, as the lessons learned from the research are continuously being fed back to assistance programs, who can use it to better serve the survivors they are working with. It is also so great to actually see research and feedback in the voices of the survivors themselves; it is such a dignifying way to make their stories heard.