Yesterday, I went to 11 am Mass at the ULA campus chapel. I've gone before, but only to the 5 pm Mass. It was all normal until we got to the Our Father, when the choir started playing the opening notes to "The Sound of Silence."
Yes, by Simon & Garfunkel.
I tried as hard as I could to not hear the words "and the words of the prophet are written on the subway walls" when I should have been praying, but it was not possible. I also tried not to look shocked, but I'm sure I failed there too. Maybe the Venezuelans don't have my level of distraction since they have to translate the English.
In Plaza Bolivar, there is a man who plays the flute and alternates between this song and the theme from Titanic. Now I wonder if he's playing "The Sound of Silence" or "Our Father," and if the Hail Mary has been set to that 1990s masterpiece.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Friday, July 17, 2009
Graveyard Shift
One week and three days left in Venezuela!
This past week, we've been surveying the cemeteries looking for mosquitoes. This should have been a rapid and simple quest that is completed by now. Unfortunately, the trips to Mucuchíes (3000 m) and Mucurubá (2400 m) seem to have caused problems in two of the Malariología vehicles. Or maybe the problems were there before, it's hard to say since I don't know much about cars. But I can say that I have developed an appreciation for good cars and powerful trucks. I didn't understand the attraction before, but I definitely do now.
Another personal change is that I have gotten over all uneasiness regarding cemeteries. They used to freak me out a little bit, and I would hate it when they were part of our route in high school track practice. But now, we're working in cemeteries where the graves are so close as to be touching and I have to climb over the stones to get to the flower vases and check for larvae. I've skirted narrowly by open tombs, tripped over grass-covered crosses, and walked through gigantic spiderwebs. Of course, this has all been done in daylight with a sturdy reliable coworker.
I did a lot of data entry today, so here's a little discussion of the standings in Meagan vs. Mosquito: we surveyed 13 sites in Mérida, only 3 of which did not have mosquitos. I consider the 3 without mosquitos to be a small gain for us, since we get information lots of information from their absence but we didn't affect anything in the present. In the other 10 sites, we were sometimes able to treat the whole area and sometimes only half. All of our 5 Ejido sites had larvae, with a similar situation regarding access. In El Vigía, all 6 sites were positive for larvae. In fact, we came to expect that the majority of houses we entered had larvae, which is a bracing situation in terms of public health. Although we treated left and right, I'm sure it was only a small dent in the overall population.
After that rundown, I realize there may be some head-scratching about what I actually did all summer and what this information means. A quick description: after deciding on our sites within each city, two or three of us went to the requisite corner or landmark. This part often involved demonstrative hand-waving discussions with lots of "aquí" and "allí" and "no, no, no." Once that was done, we recorded temperature measurements and GPS points. Then we approached the first house, store, or building. Usually, a Malariología person spoke first and flashed their fancy badge while I tried to look amiable, non-intimidating, and Spanish-speaking. Once given permission to enter, one of us would ask questions about water supply and trash collection while the rest of us walked through the house looking for and recording the buckets, tanks, flower pots, vases, and other water containers. When one was found to have larvae, at least two of us would confer about species ID. By this time, the people living in the house would have figured out that I was not from Venezuela, and I fielded lots of questions about where I am from and why I am here. By and large, people are friendly and this is a lot of fun, and the older people had a tendency to give me all kinds of blessings and welcomes. However, sometimes people would manifest their curiosity by pointing at me and asking "does the skinny girl speak Spanish?" Then we would shake their hands and say "gracias" and "a la orden" many times and move to the next house.
A resolution: I will be extra nice to the people who come house-to-house and end up at mine. I have a very deep gratitude to everyone who offered us water, coffee, juice, and a place to sit in the shade during the extreme heat. I was especially touched by the very poor woman who pulled out her plastic chairs and her blackberry wine and by an older man who gave us tall glasses of hand-squeezed guyabana juice. Muchísimo gracias.
This past week, we've been surveying the cemeteries looking for mosquitoes. This should have been a rapid and simple quest that is completed by now. Unfortunately, the trips to Mucuchíes (3000 m) and Mucurubá (2400 m) seem to have caused problems in two of the Malariología vehicles. Or maybe the problems were there before, it's hard to say since I don't know much about cars. But I can say that I have developed an appreciation for good cars and powerful trucks. I didn't understand the attraction before, but I definitely do now.
Another personal change is that I have gotten over all uneasiness regarding cemeteries. They used to freak me out a little bit, and I would hate it when they were part of our route in high school track practice. But now, we're working in cemeteries where the graves are so close as to be touching and I have to climb over the stones to get to the flower vases and check for larvae. I've skirted narrowly by open tombs, tripped over grass-covered crosses, and walked through gigantic spiderwebs. Of course, this has all been done in daylight with a sturdy reliable coworker.
I did a lot of data entry today, so here's a little discussion of the standings in Meagan vs. Mosquito: we surveyed 13 sites in Mérida, only 3 of which did not have mosquitos. I consider the 3 without mosquitos to be a small gain for us, since we get information lots of information from their absence but we didn't affect anything in the present. In the other 10 sites, we were sometimes able to treat the whole area and sometimes only half. All of our 5 Ejido sites had larvae, with a similar situation regarding access. In El Vigía, all 6 sites were positive for larvae. In fact, we came to expect that the majority of houses we entered had larvae, which is a bracing situation in terms of public health. Although we treated left and right, I'm sure it was only a small dent in the overall population.
After that rundown, I realize there may be some head-scratching about what I actually did all summer and what this information means. A quick description: after deciding on our sites within each city, two or three of us went to the requisite corner or landmark. This part often involved demonstrative hand-waving discussions with lots of "aquí" and "allí" and "no, no, no." Once that was done, we recorded temperature measurements and GPS points. Then we approached the first house, store, or building. Usually, a Malariología person spoke first and flashed their fancy badge while I tried to look amiable, non-intimidating, and Spanish-speaking. Once given permission to enter, one of us would ask questions about water supply and trash collection while the rest of us walked through the house looking for and recording the buckets, tanks, flower pots, vases, and other water containers. When one was found to have larvae, at least two of us would confer about species ID. By this time, the people living in the house would have figured out that I was not from Venezuela, and I fielded lots of questions about where I am from and why I am here. By and large, people are friendly and this is a lot of fun, and the older people had a tendency to give me all kinds of blessings and welcomes. However, sometimes people would manifest their curiosity by pointing at me and asking "does the skinny girl speak Spanish?" Then we would shake their hands and say "gracias" and "a la orden" many times and move to the next house.
A resolution: I will be extra nice to the people who come house-to-house and end up at mine. I have a very deep gratitude to everyone who offered us water, coffee, juice, and a place to sit in the shade during the extreme heat. I was especially touched by the very poor woman who pulled out her plastic chairs and her blackberry wine and by an older man who gave us tall glasses of hand-squeezed guyabana juice. Muchísimo gracias.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Michael Jackson
Just in case you missed it, Michael Jackson has died. I was told this by a professor at ULA on the day that it happened, but I would have figured it out soon enough even with my limited comprehension of Venezuelan news programs.
What is the response of the Venezuelan people to this? Well, the news here has focused largely on Honduras, Iran, H1N1, and lately China. But Michael Jackson is being played nonstop in restaurants and on radios and in cyber cafés like this one, and as an American the topic is considered an appropriate conversation starter for me. For example
me: Excuse me, ma'am, look. There are larvae in this flower pot.
señora: Ah, you're North American. What is your favorite Michael Jackson song?
But even scientists succumb to the gossip. I was having coffee after work today with my professor and Karen from UCV, and one of his videos was playing. We started to talk about the crazy press storm, and then I admitted that this nonstop montage of songs was the background sound of my childhood years and that I didn't mind it too much. Then we speculated on his cause of death and debated his crazy life and compared him to Madonna...and then realized that we were caught in it, too.
This round might go to the mosquitos for remaining above it all, except for the fact that I'm sure they'd dance to Billy Jean if they were sentient.
What is the response of the Venezuelan people to this? Well, the news here has focused largely on Honduras, Iran, H1N1, and lately China. But Michael Jackson is being played nonstop in restaurants and on radios and in cyber cafés like this one, and as an American the topic is considered an appropriate conversation starter for me. For example
me: Excuse me, ma'am, look. There are larvae in this flower pot.
señora: Ah, you're North American. What is your favorite Michael Jackson song?
But even scientists succumb to the gossip. I was having coffee after work today with my professor and Karen from UCV, and one of his videos was playing. We started to talk about the crazy press storm, and then I admitted that this nonstop montage of songs was the background sound of my childhood years and that I didn't mind it too much. Then we speculated on his cause of death and debated his crazy life and compared him to Madonna...and then realized that we were caught in it, too.
This round might go to the mosquitos for remaining above it all, except for the fact that I'm sure they'd dance to Billy Jean if they were sentient.
Monday, July 6, 2009
planning in El Vigía
Seven weeks down now, three to go. In fact, I should be arriving in the DC airport at just about this time in exactly three weeks. I'm pretty flagrantly counting down now, especially since Ryan will be back in the US around this time tomorrow night.
This is not to say that I haven't been having a great time here! I have had the exceptional luck to work with the wonderful Malariología group, who have dedicated much time and energy to getting this project off the ground and who have furthermore befriended me. I hope that my work will produce results that are interesting and useful to them, and I hope that they like the Yale t-shirts that I'm going to give them. They've given me a Combata Dengue shirt which is super awesome and has an upside-down (ie dead) Aedes mosquito on it, tell-tale white striped feet flailing in the air. I'll try to get a picture wearing it.
My professor from Yale arrived here on Friday morning. She's getting a first-hand view of my field work and methods, and over the weekend we met with a professor from ULA and with the jefe and Dr. Jose Carlos at Malariología. The jefe's 15-year daughter was there too, and laughed uproariously at just about every question I asked in Spanish (I'm actually quite a big hit with teenagers. At the posada in Mérida, the daughter of the dueños were super impressed that I had visited both Chicago and San Francisco, and a high school American kid tried to pick me up in the ice cream shop.) Anyway, my professor is pretty happy with my work so far, and we're discussing dropping my last city and working a bit more thoroughly on determining the upper limit of mosquito larval presence. Sorry Santana fans, that means we skip Tovar.
Our current city is El Vigía, which is about an hour and a world away from Mérida. It's HOT here and humid too, and not as historic or well-planned of a city. It feels a bit like the auto retail strips in Florida between where my grandpa lived in Fort Pierce and where he lives now in Port St. Lucie, except with small smoky restaurants stuck in between the larger commercial properties. I pick up criaderos (breeding sites, which are some kind of container with water) that are way to hot to support life. I can already tell that the larval density is higher here, which is great in terms of my project but difficult in terms of control. This hits on a guilty point for many public health researchers: we get excited about interesting data and complicated problems, but their existance means a great deal of trouble for lots of people. In this case, my conscience is eased a bit by the fact that we use larvicide to kill all the larvae that we find. It's quite satisfying and I recommend treating all of your temporary water containers.
I've been surprised by the lack of resources at the office here in El Vigía. I've become accustomed to thinking of Venezuela as a pretty developed country, but the satellite Malariología office has one computer with no internet and no maps of their own city anywhere in sight. There are no training programs or conferences and there are constant transportation problems. It makes me extremely grateful for the CDC and for all of the state health departments in the US. Happy Indepence Day, my American friends.
This is not to say that I haven't been having a great time here! I have had the exceptional luck to work with the wonderful Malariología group, who have dedicated much time and energy to getting this project off the ground and who have furthermore befriended me. I hope that my work will produce results that are interesting and useful to them, and I hope that they like the Yale t-shirts that I'm going to give them. They've given me a Combata Dengue shirt which is super awesome and has an upside-down (ie dead) Aedes mosquito on it, tell-tale white striped feet flailing in the air. I'll try to get a picture wearing it.
My professor from Yale arrived here on Friday morning. She's getting a first-hand view of my field work and methods, and over the weekend we met with a professor from ULA and with the jefe and Dr. Jose Carlos at Malariología. The jefe's 15-year daughter was there too, and laughed uproariously at just about every question I asked in Spanish (I'm actually quite a big hit with teenagers. At the posada in Mérida, the daughter of the dueños were super impressed that I had visited both Chicago and San Francisco, and a high school American kid tried to pick me up in the ice cream shop.) Anyway, my professor is pretty happy with my work so far, and we're discussing dropping my last city and working a bit more thoroughly on determining the upper limit of mosquito larval presence. Sorry Santana fans, that means we skip Tovar.
Our current city is El Vigía, which is about an hour and a world away from Mérida. It's HOT here and humid too, and not as historic or well-planned of a city. It feels a bit like the auto retail strips in Florida between where my grandpa lived in Fort Pierce and where he lives now in Port St. Lucie, except with small smoky restaurants stuck in between the larger commercial properties. I pick up criaderos (breeding sites, which are some kind of container with water) that are way to hot to support life. I can already tell that the larval density is higher here, which is great in terms of my project but difficult in terms of control. This hits on a guilty point for many public health researchers: we get excited about interesting data and complicated problems, but their existance means a great deal of trouble for lots of people. In this case, my conscience is eased a bit by the fact that we use larvicide to kill all the larvae that we find. It's quite satisfying and I recommend treating all of your temporary water containers.
I've been surprised by the lack of resources at the office here in El Vigía. I've become accustomed to thinking of Venezuela as a pretty developed country, but the satellite Malariología office has one computer with no internet and no maps of their own city anywhere in sight. There are no training programs or conferences and there are constant transportation problems. It makes me extremely grateful for the CDC and for all of the state health departments in the US. Happy Indepence Day, my American friends.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Six Weeks down
Hello! I'm sorry that I've been missing in action for the past two weeks. I'm here to assure you that I am alive and well. Tomorrow, I will have been in Venezuela for six weeks and I have four more to go!Jenn Simpson, a third-year grad student from Yale in my program, is here to help me with my preliminary analysis and to make sure that I'm not missing any important components of my field work. It's been wonderful to have a friend here. Last Tuesday was my birthday. At first I was a bit ambivalent about spending it so far away from my family and friends, but it turned out to be a lot of fun! Jenn, Nelson, and Alejandra (the latter two from UCV) cooked up a barbeque and we had ice cream cake and wine with it. They all sang birthday songs throughout the day for me (even at work). Here I am applauding their efforts.
On Thurdsay night, Sarita came in to Mérida to visit Jenn and me. We spent Friday walking around the city and eating vegetables (not a favorite here). On Saturday, we took a bus up into the mountains to go hiking around Lake Mucubají, around 3000 m.
We had information from the mucuposada hiking network that told us we could reach the entrance to the park from Apartaderos, so we took the bus there and were told that we were 15 minutes away from the park. That didn't seem too long, so we started walking along the curvy mountain highway. At about 45 minutes, we realized that our informant meant 15 minutes driving. We flagged a truck down and he gave us a ride the rest of way, stopping first to hitch a stalled car behind him as well. The lake was absolutely beautiful though, as was the rest of the park.
We had information from the mucuposada hiking network that told us we could reach the entrance to the park from Apartaderos, so we took the bus there and were told that we were 15 minutes away from the park. That didn't seem too long, so we started walking along the curvy mountain highway. At about 45 minutes, we realized that our informant meant 15 minutes driving. We flagged a truck down and he gave us a ride the rest of way, stopping first to hitch a stalled car behind him as well. The lake was absolutely beautiful though, as was the rest of the park. After hiking, we went out for pizza and drinks at a café in the center of town. Since our sever was being a bit weirdly exclusive in his attentions, we decided to leave and check out Café Calypso, which is listed in Lonely Planet as having the best mojitos in town. Although my sample size is limited, I will agree that they were truly excellent. We were at first happy just to sit down, but the combined effect of the mojitos and the pounding techno music had us dancing soon enough. Astute readers will note that we were still wearing our hiking gear, including the boots. Graceful we are always.
As a wrap-up to this post, I am still trying to devise a way to keep score in the Meagan vs. Mosquito competition. Number of breeding grounds eliminated for me? Number of houses missed for them? Site-by-site or city-by-city or house-by-house? It's hard to say, and I'm willing to take suggestions. But I have decided to keep a parallel count, which is Meagan vs. Infectious Diseases, personal. This will be on a weekly basis. So far, the count is Diseases = 2, Meagan = 4. Booyah.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
H1N1 and other strange things
I don't have much time, but in short, the past three days have been a little crazy. But good. I was asked to help out with prevention for H1N1 (confirmed in El Vigía on Sunday), which is sort of hilarious and intimidating at the same time since I sort of resolutely ignored most of the flu stuff that was going on around me this year. But I'm doing my best to sort through the information out there, to contact people who know more than me, and to give them what I can.
I've done five sites in Mérida in the past three days. On Monday, we started off with a government educational facility where a man insisted on pronouncing "Yale" in the "Spanish" way and continued through a construction site unexpectedly teeming with larvae and on to an apartment where we were denied access since we might kidnap the residents (I know that I look pretty intimidating). Our site yesterday was the teleférico station, which is the longest cable car system in the world but unfortunately closed. In the afternoon, we decided to map out all of the rest of our sites at once, but the office lost electricity and we didn't have a random number table. So I wrote the digits out on ten pieces of paper and had my team pick the numbers, which attracted quite a bit of attention since we were in the atrium in order to use the sunlight. Today, we began with a farm where we found ginormous unidentifiable mosquito larvae, which we brought back to ULA to grow up and identify as adults. Then we went cavorting through the mountains to two other sites, at one point discussing the project with the owner of a trout farm. I have no idea what is going to happen tomorrow.
But here's a picture of Tuesday's team: Ivan (UCV), me, Sergio, and Henry (both Malariología). We're at the teleférico station. Beautiful workplace, no?
I've done five sites in Mérida in the past three days. On Monday, we started off with a government educational facility where a man insisted on pronouncing "Yale" in the "Spanish" way and continued through a construction site unexpectedly teeming with larvae and on to an apartment where we were denied access since we might kidnap the residents (I know that I look pretty intimidating). Our site yesterday was the teleférico station, which is the longest cable car system in the world but unfortunately closed. In the afternoon, we decided to map out all of the rest of our sites at once, but the office lost electricity and we didn't have a random number table. So I wrote the digits out on ten pieces of paper and had my team pick the numbers, which attracted quite a bit of attention since we were in the atrium in order to use the sunlight. Today, we began with a farm where we found ginormous unidentifiable mosquito larvae, which we brought back to ULA to grow up and identify as adults. Then we went cavorting through the mountains to two other sites, at one point discussing the project with the owner of a trout farm. I have no idea what is going to happen tomorrow.
But here's a picture of Tuesday's team: Ivan (UCV), me, Sergio, and Henry (both Malariología). We're at the teleférico station. Beautiful workplace, no?
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Good people
I just received the nicest email from Javier Bastidas, the jefe at Malariología. Basically, he said that he thinks our work is very important, and that his office and their resources are at our disposal. He's contacted the people who will help us and told them to extend every hospitality. He's even giving us office space to use, which means that we don't have to keep hauling our maps around as luggage. He called me "Doctora Meagan" and used lots of exclamation points. I sort of thought that he wasn't impressed with me during the meeting, so this a wonderfully nice email to receive.
As an update on the project, we've decided to stratify our sample sites by parroquias, which are literally "parishes" (a level of government smaller than municipio, which is smaller than estado or state). We'll be sampling one randomly selected area within each parroquia. This helps us spread our sites more evenly across the cities, weighing for area and population. Also, we've decided on our cities. We're going to use Mérida, Ejido, El Vigía and Tovar. This keeps us in Mérida State, which means that our historical data will be more uniform. (Side note: Johann Santana -- pitcher for the Mets, former pitcher for the Minnesota Twins, and probably the only baseball player that I know anything about -- is from Tovar. Everyone here thinks that I have great taste in sports. Thank you, Eric.)
And finally, Jennifer Simpson is coming to visit and help out in two weeks. Yay Jenn! She's a student in Maria's lab who is two years ahead of me in the Ph.D program. I'm super excited about this. While she's here, Sarita is planning to visit from Caracas and we're going to do something outdoorsy and adventurous during a weekend. Yay for friends!
As an update on the project, we've decided to stratify our sample sites by parroquias, which are literally "parishes" (a level of government smaller than municipio, which is smaller than estado or state). We'll be sampling one randomly selected area within each parroquia. This helps us spread our sites more evenly across the cities, weighing for area and population. Also, we've decided on our cities. We're going to use Mérida, Ejido, El Vigía and Tovar. This keeps us in Mérida State, which means that our historical data will be more uniform. (Side note: Johann Santana -- pitcher for the Mets, former pitcher for the Minnesota Twins, and probably the only baseball player that I know anything about -- is from Tovar. Everyone here thinks that I have great taste in sports. Thank you, Eric.)
And finally, Jennifer Simpson is coming to visit and help out in two weeks. Yay Jenn! She's a student in Maria's lab who is two years ahead of me in the Ph.D program. I'm super excited about this. While she's here, Sarita is planning to visit from Caracas and we're going to do something outdoorsy and adventurous during a weekend. Yay for friends!
Saturday, June 6, 2009
830 Flavors
Last night, I tried to buy a phone but the phone company's computers were down. So instead, we went out for ice cream. We went to this heladeria that's in the Guiness Book of World Records for having the most flavors of ice cream, 830 flavors to be exact. In truth, there are only about 100 out at a time, but it was pretty spectacular. The owner is a Portuguese man who is super sweet (appropriate for an ice cream shop, no? Forgive me, I can't make puns in Spanish yet so I'm feeling deprived). When he found out that this was my first time in Venezuela, he walked along the counter with me and gave me tastes of some of the more unusual flavors, including:
-corn
-caraota (black beans)
-amor eternal (a cocktail)
-regional (a beer)
and several fruits whose names I unfortunately can't remember. There was also an amazingly spicy chili pepper flavor from which we all took very very small tastes. As we all stood there trying to quench the burn with our ice cream cones, he laughed and gave us a ginger flavor that made it disappear immediately. He then gave me a signed flavor list and I took a picture with him and his Guinness books. JC (the prof from UCV) has it and he's on his way back to Caracas, but I'll post it when I get it.
Yesterday morning, we had a meeting with the chief of the Malariology Division in Mérida state. He's in charge of entomological studies. He was very interested in the project, and now we have about 7 years' worth of reactive entomological surveillance information as well as the use of the division's truck and one person to survey with us. In exchange, I may have to appear on TV or radio with him as a publicity thing for dengue control. Given my Spanish grammar, I'm sort of skeptical about whether this last part is a wise move for them. But I'll let you all know if I become a big star in the entomology world.
-corn
-caraota (black beans)
-amor eternal (a cocktail)
-regional (a beer)
and several fruits whose names I unfortunately can't remember. There was also an amazingly spicy chili pepper flavor from which we all took very very small tastes. As we all stood there trying to quench the burn with our ice cream cones, he laughed and gave us a ginger flavor that made it disappear immediately. He then gave me a signed flavor list and I took a picture with him and his Guinness books. JC (the prof from UCV) has it and he's on his way back to Caracas, but I'll post it when I get it.
Yesterday morning, we had a meeting with the chief of the Malariology Division in Mérida state. He's in charge of entomological studies. He was very interested in the project, and now we have about 7 years' worth of reactive entomological surveillance information as well as the use of the division's truck and one person to survey with us. In exchange, I may have to appear on TV or radio with him as a publicity thing for dengue control. Given my Spanish grammar, I'm sort of skeptical about whether this last part is a wise move for them. But I'll let you all know if I become a big star in the entomology world.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
No Hay Luz
Today I switched cabañas. Previously, Adriana and I were staying in Cabañas Ana Cristina. We had a small apartment with two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom that was way way high up in Santa Rosa. The pictures are the view from our balcony (the one with me is a bit blurry, since we were trying to get lots of mountains in the pictures while simultaneously providing proof that I am actually alive). However, Adriana went back to Caracas today and is being replaced by Juan Carlos (the prof), Nelson (the lab tech), and Ivan (the nice guy who invited Sarah and I to the beach). They should be arriving any moment now. I hope so, anyway. And later I'll post pictures of the new place!There have been a series of power outages here in the past few days. Last night, we had an outage for about two hours, and there was another for two hours this afternoon. I found out that the afternoon outage was actually a planned rationing step. It was a bit frustrating, since most of the things that I needed to get done today involved electricity -- light for drawing my map sites, a computer to apply for image acquisition, electricity for laundry. There is a Spanish post-doc here who sat on the bench outside the lab and commiserated with me, and then we were joined by a very nice prof in entomology who starting raving about the Ithaca music scene. He knows the guys in Donna the Buffalo (whose CD Marne gave me) and loves the Trumansburg music festival. He visited Yale in the late 90's and he thinks that New Haven is pretty, if a bit rough. I raised my eyebrows and asked "and Caracas?" and he conceded the point.
When I was packing for Venezuela, Marylee (Ryan's mom) insisted that I borrow her Swiss Army knife. These things are the ultimate in gadgetry, and it has turned out to be the single most useful item that I have ever brought with me on any trip. We've used this one to chop up food, to cut open packages, to open cans and bottles, and to put batteries in our devices. I've even used the magnifying glass to read the teeny print on one of the maps that I have. And yes, I'm pretty sure that using the magnifying glass on a Swiss Army knife to fix a real problem makes me way cool.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Welcome to Mérida!
Hi there, everyone! Thanks so much for your comments and your emails. I'll do my best to keep up!
On Thursday morning, Adriana and I flew to El Vigía and then took a bus to Mérida, which is high in the Andes and bordered on all sides by mountains. It will be my first site for the project. On Friday morning, we met with the aquatic insect group at the Universidad de Los Andes. They were extraordinarily helpful and gave lots of wonderful feedback regarding the project, including potential site changes. We're in the midst of revising that now. Also, they gave us contact information to obtain the offical dengue numbers for the state. We tried to meet up with the doctor who has the information, but a demonstration in the middle of the city made the route impassable. We're meeting tomorrow instead. Also, we went to the mapatecas (the awesome word for map libraries!) and found maps for the cities that we want to use. Unfortunately some are nearly 50 years old, and the region has changed much, but we'll work on supplementing that bare-bones information with Google Earth or other satellite data. We have to return to the mapateca on Monday, since the electricity cut out just as we were about to print. It was a long day, but this was all a huge amount of work to get done.
Adriana has been super wonderful. On Thursday, I was stopped in the airport by the people doing swine flu surveillance and sent to the public health desk. This was despite the fact that I've been in the country longer than the incubation period, but I decided not to argue very much with the nice soldier. Adriana struck up a conversation with the public health woman and got the contact information for the dengue surveillance people in the city. It was pretty awesome. She's clearly very good at convincing people to give us information, and I'm trying to learn Spanish tricks from her.
My Spanish is improving amazingly. Even I can tell. I'm starting to use it reflexively to ask and answer questions, and I no longer hesitate over every word. A very strange thing has also started to happen where the words for things just fill themselves in, even though I thought that I had forgotten them years ago. It's far from fluent, but it's definitely better.
OK, the cyber cafe is closing. Oops. Ciao!
On Thursday morning, Adriana and I flew to El Vigía and then took a bus to Mérida, which is high in the Andes and bordered on all sides by mountains. It will be my first site for the project. On Friday morning, we met with the aquatic insect group at the Universidad de Los Andes. They were extraordinarily helpful and gave lots of wonderful feedback regarding the project, including potential site changes. We're in the midst of revising that now. Also, they gave us contact information to obtain the offical dengue numbers for the state. We tried to meet up with the doctor who has the information, but a demonstration in the middle of the city made the route impassable. We're meeting tomorrow instead. Also, we went to the mapatecas (the awesome word for map libraries!) and found maps for the cities that we want to use. Unfortunately some are nearly 50 years old, and the region has changed much, but we'll work on supplementing that bare-bones information with Google Earth or other satellite data. We have to return to the mapateca on Monday, since the electricity cut out just as we were about to print. It was a long day, but this was all a huge amount of work to get done.
Adriana has been super wonderful. On Thursday, I was stopped in the airport by the people doing swine flu surveillance and sent to the public health desk. This was despite the fact that I've been in the country longer than the incubation period, but I decided not to argue very much with the nice soldier. Adriana struck up a conversation with the public health woman and got the contact information for the dengue surveillance people in the city. It was pretty awesome. She's clearly very good at convincing people to give us information, and I'm trying to learn Spanish tricks from her.
My Spanish is improving amazingly. Even I can tell. I'm starting to use it reflexively to ask and answer questions, and I no longer hesitate over every word. A very strange thing has also started to happen where the words for things just fill themselves in, even though I thought that I had forgotten them years ago. It's far from fluent, but it's definitely better.
OK, the cyber cafe is closing. Oops. Ciao!
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
The Plan
Now that I have you all hooked (or a few of you anyway), let's talk about the science!
Dengue fever is a disease caused by a virus which is carried by the mosquito Aedes aegypti. There's no vaccination and no treatment. It can sometimes lead to the more severe disease known as dengue hemorrhagic fever, which usually happens after someone has had a case of dengue fever already from one of the other serotypes. There are four serotypes.
The mosquito lives primarily in cities and breeds in artificial water containers such as water tanks, tires, buckets, and discarded trash filled with rainwater. The mosquito is also the vector for yellow fever, so there was a big push to eradicate it from the Americas in the 1950s and 1960s. But efforts waned, and rapid urbanization provided plenty of breeding grounds, and the mosquito came back in the 1970s and now covers even more area than it had inhabited before.
The point of my work this summer is to look at the distribution of the mosquito in cities in the Venezuelan Andes. We're interested in looking both between cities (what makes the cities different?) and within cities (what makes parts of the same city different from each other?). For these analyses, we'll be collecting data about the climate as well as information about population density, frequency of trash collection, and other socioeconomic variables. We're also interested in what we can learn from satellite data ("remote sensing") about city structure and its thermal properties and the change in the city over time. Oh right, and the mosquitoes.
The real work of the summer will be studying the mosquitoes. I'm going to four cities in the Andes mountain region: Mérida, Lagunillas, Barinas, and Barinitas. The first two are in the mountains, the second two in the plains next to the mountains. The first of each pair is large and the second is small. I'll have square (-ish, let's be realistic) sample sites picked out for each city, and within each "cell" we'll go door-to-door, requesting participation in the study. We have a questionnaire about household information and recent history of dengue, and then we'll survey the house and yard for larvae or potential breeding grounds.
The use of squares or cells is actually a bit new. Usually, surveyors just count 50 houses or 100 houses as they walk up a street and call it a day. However, that method doesn't work well if we want to coordinate our data with information from the satellite images. Remote sensing studies are pretty new in itself, and I think we'll be able to get a lot of information about neighborhood change and its effects on the mosquito distribution from this one in addition to the information about the effect of climate/altitude on the distribution between cities.
Well, that's a lot. So I'll leave it there for now. Let me know if there are any questions, as I could write (and have written) pages and pages more about this project.
On Thursday I leave for Mérida with Adriana, one of the lab techs here at UCV. We just purchased our flights today, which is a bit more of a last-minute approach than usual. I'll be leaving Sarah, the other public health student from Yale, here in Caracas. She's taking on the mosquitoes which carry malaria in the mangroves of the northern beaches. We used to joke at the University of Maryland about "studying beach malaria" during our vacations, and I think I'm going to let them know that it actually exists.
Dengue fever is a disease caused by a virus which is carried by the mosquito Aedes aegypti. There's no vaccination and no treatment. It can sometimes lead to the more severe disease known as dengue hemorrhagic fever, which usually happens after someone has had a case of dengue fever already from one of the other serotypes. There are four serotypes.
The mosquito lives primarily in cities and breeds in artificial water containers such as water tanks, tires, buckets, and discarded trash filled with rainwater. The mosquito is also the vector for yellow fever, so there was a big push to eradicate it from the Americas in the 1950s and 1960s. But efforts waned, and rapid urbanization provided plenty of breeding grounds, and the mosquito came back in the 1970s and now covers even more area than it had inhabited before.
The point of my work this summer is to look at the distribution of the mosquito in cities in the Venezuelan Andes. We're interested in looking both between cities (what makes the cities different?) and within cities (what makes parts of the same city different from each other?). For these analyses, we'll be collecting data about the climate as well as information about population density, frequency of trash collection, and other socioeconomic variables. We're also interested in what we can learn from satellite data ("remote sensing") about city structure and its thermal properties and the change in the city over time. Oh right, and the mosquitoes.
The real work of the summer will be studying the mosquitoes. I'm going to four cities in the Andes mountain region: Mérida, Lagunillas, Barinas, and Barinitas. The first two are in the mountains, the second two in the plains next to the mountains. The first of each pair is large and the second is small. I'll have square (-ish, let's be realistic) sample sites picked out for each city, and within each "cell" we'll go door-to-door, requesting participation in the study. We have a questionnaire about household information and recent history of dengue, and then we'll survey the house and yard for larvae or potential breeding grounds.
The use of squares or cells is actually a bit new. Usually, surveyors just count 50 houses or 100 houses as they walk up a street and call it a day. However, that method doesn't work well if we want to coordinate our data with information from the satellite images. Remote sensing studies are pretty new in itself, and I think we'll be able to get a lot of information about neighborhood change and its effects on the mosquito distribution from this one in addition to the information about the effect of climate/altitude on the distribution between cities.
Well, that's a lot. So I'll leave it there for now. Let me know if there are any questions, as I could write (and have written) pages and pages more about this project.
On Thursday I leave for Mérida with Adriana, one of the lab techs here at UCV. We just purchased our flights today, which is a bit more of a last-minute approach than usual. I'll be leaving Sarah, the other public health student from Yale, here in Caracas. She's taking on the mosquitoes which carry malaria in the mangroves of the northern beaches. We used to joke at the University of Maryland about "studying beach malaria" during our vacations, and I think I'm going to let them know that it actually exists.
Flux
Flux is the name of this really great card game that Sarah M and Bob taught me to play a few years ago. The basic concept is that the goals and the rules are always being changed by the players as they try to create the most advantageous position for themselves. It's the best analogy that is coming to mind to describe my adventures in setting up a budget here. Prices change, terms change, and schedules change. The really difficult part is that I'm not allowed to change the rules. I think I should earn something like a gazillion intelligence points if I can get through this one.
I may be a bit cranky because I just got over a flux of a different sort. Sarita and I went to the mall on Friday night, which was huge and brand-new, two stories above ground and five or six below with a central atrium open all the way. It was a pretty impressive mall. Unfortunately, something that I ate there decided not to get along with the bacteria already in my stomach, and on Saturday morning the natives staged a revolt. I'll spare you the details; it suffices to say that I didn't go to the beach that afternoon.
I will say that I've been very impressed with the hospitality of the people here. When I was green and looking pretty awful outside of a metro station and trying to return to the apartment, a woman came over and gave me water. I am incredibly grateful for her kindness. She also asked if I was pregnant and looked skeptical when I said no, but I'm not inclined to be particular about my angels.
I may be a bit cranky because I just got over a flux of a different sort. Sarita and I went to the mall on Friday night, which was huge and brand-new, two stories above ground and five or six below with a central atrium open all the way. It was a pretty impressive mall. Unfortunately, something that I ate there decided not to get along with the bacteria already in my stomach, and on Saturday morning the natives staged a revolt. I'll spare you the details; it suffices to say that I didn't go to the beach that afternoon.
I will say that I've been very impressed with the hospitality of the people here. When I was green and looking pretty awful outside of a metro station and trying to return to the apartment, a woman came over and gave me water. I am incredibly grateful for her kindness. She also asked if I was pregnant and looked skeptical when I said no, but I'm not inclined to be particular about my angels.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Malas Palabras
Last night, a young man was stopped for disturbing the peace outside of the apartments where I am staying. The police rather undermined their own cause with the sirens and lights, but no matter. Carina, David, and their neighbors in the the apartments up and down the street all came to the balcony to watch the guy get searched and to add their own reprimands. There were quite a few things yelled, and David started laughing and asked whether I understood any of it. Obviously, this is obviously not your common schoolbook vocabulary. Carina became indignant that they were not in her Spanish-English dictionary and is going to file a complaint with the publisher.
Sarah told me that when she and her host mother returned home from the store yesterday, she met a man who is the father of the guy who sat next to us on the plane from DC to Miami. The man gives accordian lessons to the host mother, and when Sarah was introduced as an international student at UCV, he asked whether or not she was a public health student (insert weird freak-out stalker moment here). He then said that his son went to Harvard and had mentioned the two Yale students from the plane to his dad. So now we might have dinner with a German Jewish accordian player and his Harvard economist son in Caracas. Weird, right?
To assure you all that I am actually working, today I talked with people at the INH (like our NIH) about dengue caseload and I obtained GIS files with streets and city outlines for the country. It's exciting to be getting the information after all the time spent preparing. I'm still working on the logistics of getting to Mérida, my first field site in the Andes, since the lab truck needs repairing. There is a lot to do, including eat dinner, which I am going to do now. ¡Ciao!
Sarah told me that when she and her host mother returned home from the store yesterday, she met a man who is the father of the guy who sat next to us on the plane from DC to Miami. The man gives accordian lessons to the host mother, and when Sarah was introduced as an international student at UCV, he asked whether or not she was a public health student (insert weird freak-out stalker moment here). He then said that his son went to Harvard and had mentioned the two Yale students from the plane to his dad. So now we might have dinner with a German Jewish accordian player and his Harvard economist son in Caracas. Weird, right?
To assure you all that I am actually working, today I talked with people at the INH (like our NIH) about dengue caseload and I obtained GIS files with streets and city outlines for the country. It's exciting to be getting the information after all the time spent preparing. I'm still working on the logistics of getting to Mérida, my first field site in the Andes, since the lab truck needs repairing. There is a lot to do, including eat dinner, which I am going to do now. ¡Ciao!
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
On the Metro
I take the metro to work and back to the apartment. It's efficient and clean and easy to use, and I'm very impressed with it. It's a 40 minute trip, which gives me plenty of time to people-watch.
One of the first things that I noticed was the fashion. Everyone here wears pants, and there is hardly a skirt or pair of shorts in sight. More specifically, the vast majority of people wear jeans. Whether old, young, men, women, clearly upper-middle-class or clearly blue-collar, everyone wears jeans. There are occassionally black pants and more rarely khakis. I even snuck a look at a classroom building to check -- yep, the professors wear jeans. I don't know whether this is a caraqueño thing or a venezolano thing, but I'll find out when I get to Mérida.
Another thing is that there are lots of overweight people. And no small wonder -- all of the food that I've had so far is excellent, but very little of it has been healthy. Since arrival, I've eaten grilled cheese and ham, arepas (a sort of fried stuffed pita), "chinese" food which consisted of chicken in sweet and sour sauce with french fries and fried crab, a margherita pizza that was heavy on the cheese, and toast and jelly. Today, Sarah and I bought fruit and I ate that and only that for lunch. The fruit was amazing, but I'm doubtful that lunch fruit really compensates for the rest.
I've known that obesity, diabetes, and other diet-related chronic diseases are big issues in the developing world, but it hadn't hit home until these past few days. I know that the US is tackling its own nutritional problems, so the fact that I notice a dramatic change here is telling.
One of the first things that I noticed was the fashion. Everyone here wears pants, and there is hardly a skirt or pair of shorts in sight. More specifically, the vast majority of people wear jeans. Whether old, young, men, women, clearly upper-middle-class or clearly blue-collar, everyone wears jeans. There are occassionally black pants and more rarely khakis. I even snuck a look at a classroom building to check -- yep, the professors wear jeans. I don't know whether this is a caraqueño thing or a venezolano thing, but I'll find out when I get to Mérida.
Another thing is that there are lots of overweight people. And no small wonder -- all of the food that I've had so far is excellent, but very little of it has been healthy. Since arrival, I've eaten grilled cheese and ham, arepas (a sort of fried stuffed pita), "chinese" food which consisted of chicken in sweet and sour sauce with french fries and fried crab, a margherita pizza that was heavy on the cheese, and toast and jelly. Today, Sarah and I bought fruit and I ate that and only that for lunch. The fruit was amazing, but I'm doubtful that lunch fruit really compensates for the rest.
I've known that obesity, diabetes, and other diet-related chronic diseases are big issues in the developing world, but it hadn't hit home until these past few days. I know that the US is tackling its own nutritional problems, so the fact that I notice a dramatic change here is telling.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Arrival
Hola todos,
I arrived in Caracas last night, and I am now waiting to meet with Juan Carlos Navarro, my host here at the Universidad Central de Venezuela. I am typing on a Mac computer that has been set up for Spanish, and it was a very exciting moment when we discovered the @ symbol's location (alt plus g, FYI).
The Univesidad has a very open architecture. It reminds me a little bit of the schools that I've seen in the southern US, with lots of courtyards and gardens and walkways that are open to the weather. There is even a small garden in the center courtyard of the Instituto Zoologica, right next to the labs.
I am staying this week with the brother-in-law of my professor and with his wife, David and Carina. They are very hospitable, and last night we talked for several hours. David teaches Spanish literature and studies Greek mythology, and Carina works as a systems engineer and is trying to learn French as well as English. Their apartment is very close to the Metro, which I can use to get to the university.
That's all for this post -- I will write more on my project and on Caracas later!
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