Audio progress
One of the main problems I was facing for my thesis was obtaining good quality audio of my grandmother and mother telling stories about their lives. While I was in Egypt, I tried to get some audio recordings, but I wasn't properly equipped with a good microphone, preamp, etc. I did some research, and I asked around, until I found someone in Cairo who's an Audio Engineer for fun (it's not his day job).
He offered to go record my grandmother, my great aunt, my aunt and my mother speaking about their lives, the political climate they grew up with in Egypt, my mom's emigration, and so forth. He emailed me saying he had approximately 3 hours of audio between them all together. Because they're uncompressed raw wav files, I have to wait until they're uploaded, and then I can download them and start editing.
There is progress!