So it has been a little while since I last wrote a blog entry. The middle of the quarter has hit and I had three papers to write this week so my recreational writing and interesting activities have both decreased a little bit. This will basically serve as a recap of what I’ve been doing while I wasn’t blogging!
Overall I have been doing a lot of hanging out in cafes using internet and writing my papers, but I did receive some great news on Monday night that some of you may already know, but I’ll mention it here for people who haven’t been following me on facebook. My summer plans have been fully funded by a Stanford grant and so I’ll definitely be in Tanzania doing research this summer! The big part is that Marlene will be there as well and we’ll be working on the same project! I think I mentioned some about the project in the very first entry I wrote on here, but I’ll describe the research again here.
Diarrheal disease is a huge problem and one of the leading causes of mortality in children under 5 throughout the developing world. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been much improvement in this area in the last twenty years in Tanzania. The larger project that we are working on is trying to use behavioral change interventions to try to get mothers of children under 5 to wash their hands as this can greatly reduce the incidence of diarrheal diseases. Marlene and I will be running focus groups to try to understand a little bit about why mothers don’t wash their hands even if they know that it can help prevent disease. I would be happy to send you more about it if you let me know and I’ll be blogging all summer too!
Last night, I went up Lion’s Head, which is one of the mountains surrounding the city of Cape Town, at sunset. When you get to the top you can see 360 degrees around Table Bay. We got up there pretty quickly and watched the sunset over the Atlantic Ocean (weird for anyone in the US?). It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen and the views are something that simply cannot be captured on camera. I’ll try to post some pictures when I get more internet because I’m almost out of my allotted internet for the month.
I hope all of you are having a great week and I’ll post some more on the blog when I get done with this week of papers!
Great news! I was talking with Ken Finn about his experiences doing dentistry in the Dominican Republic. He commented that the dentists who are on site doing ongoing care have begun focusing on teaching the kids the reasons behind good dental hygiene. The hope is that this next generation will begin to change behavior and that will have a lasting effect on future generations. You'll have to find out more details from him, but it made some sense and may be similar to hand hygiene in Tanzania. It will be very interesting to see what you and Marlene discover this summer.
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