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!