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!