Bush (Tuesday 3/18)

We went into work on Tuesday an hour late since we had been out so late the night before working. It took us only about 45 mins to drive out to the CFA from the city. We spent the morning working on the drafts of sections that would be due this coming morning. We started to work survey around 11 and by lunch we had gotten access to surveymonkey which is an online tool for making and distributing surveys and collecting responses. I spent the most of the rest of the day working on setting up the online survey which we would begin distributing next week. I input all the questions and formatting including section divisions, path logic for different sections, and coloring and schemes. Towards the end of the day I had produced a very professional looking survey that I was sure the volunteers would understand and appreciate. I had a little bit of time left so went down to human resources and negotiated the terms with them for giving me information from their volunteer database which was quite difficult because of privacy issues and the scale of the data (approximately 40,000 volunteers). In exchange for agreeing to contact brigade heads for permission along with agreeing that the data wouldn't leave the building I was able to get all the necessary demographics that I needed ordered. I should have them before the end of the week. The demographics I was able to get include: age bracket, gender, region, position/rank, brigade, and name along with their buisiness and after hours phone numbers. After wrapping that up, we left to go visit the rural brigade in Parkenham Upper.

We noticed very quickly the definition of rural here was quite a bit more extreme than our definition in the states. There was no town center in this place. Just farms and woods everywhere. It wasn't as dry as Ballarat, it was more like temperate forest. In between the woods we saw plenty of cows; they most definately out numbered people here. In between cow fields there were large sections of forest including wildlife and fauna reserves. We saw many signs for kangaroo and wombat crossing as the road switched between paved and dirt. As we drove on we were able spot some kangaroos bounding away from the car through the dense forest. It was pretty weird to see because I always thought that kangaroos were more grassland dwelling. Apparently that's not the case. We didn't have an address for the brigade but we did know what road it was on. Unfortunately that road is about 20km long. We were getting pretty worried but eventually we found the brigade at the very end of the road.

The brigade was much smaller than the previous urban brigade. It was a simple metal garage. It was basically meant to store the trucks and nothing else. We met in the captain's small office in the back of the brigade. We met with 4 of the 20 members in the brigade. Again we administered the survey and then facilitated discussion about it and the issues we were investigating. These guys were much more laid back the then previous group, however they still had a lot issues with their training that they had strong opinions about. Issues included skills maintainence, learning materials not matching standards, a lack of a learning materials repository and much more. It was much more a discussion with a bunch of guys than a focus group. We had a couple beers (not Max who was driving) and shot the ****. It was really relaxed and fun but it also was very informative. As we were leaving, they gave us some CFA Volunteer baseball caps which was awesome.

On our way home, Max almost killed us by driving on the wrong side of the road almost immeadiately after leaving the brigade. It took a pair of headlights and a horn ahead to remind him so it was pretty scary even though we weren't that close to a collision. When I got home, I ate dinner (some pretty good stir-fry), put in a load of laundry, and went to bed early.