I also began to travel and talk. In each community, I collected an average of 15 hours of taped interviews. I collected significant other information through observation and less formal discussion.

When I returned to my office, I reviewed all the tapes and transcribed those portions that spoke to questions that had arisen in other communities and that arose out of the most recent visit. I also recorded my own reflections in the context of the other work I had been doing for the project.

I focussed these reflections in the research questions, and out of the questions came a growing and progressively more coherent set of issues and assumptions.

There were three teleconference calls with members of the advisory committee, supplemented by calls and contacts with individual members. I kept checking back that my own reflections were congruent with others who either knew the issues and communities or had a feminist research perspective that allowed them to ask useful questions.

At the half-way mark, writing the interim report gave me an opportunity to provide the first account of what was happening. At the same time, a day-long meeting with two researchers not directly involved in the project Elaine Gaber-Katz and Susan Wismer gave me an opportunity to present, defend and get a new perspective on what was actually happening both to the research and to my own place within it.

I then carried on with the last two visits, with the writing of a second interim report, a proposal for the National Literacy Secretariat for the second stage research and the writing of this final document.

I was contracted to do this research over "a minimum of 60 days." The minimum was spent by the time I began writing the final report and the process since then has been one of discovery that is difficult to chart in terms of time. I don't think any woman's life breaks down easily into time spent doing dishes or shopping separate from time spent asking questions and trying to find answers. Some of us, however, for brief periods of time have the privilege of combining the questions of our lives and the questions of our work. For that I am thankful.