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.