Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I thought I'd share this video to give you an idea of the unconventionality of my Thanksgiving experience. It was bizarre to say the least. (Imagine night club music, an assortment of traditional American and Brazilian dishes, and cheesy decorations.)

I was supposed to have a presentation during my 7:OO AM Health seminar, but protesters barricaded the entrance to the university so class was canceled.

My Spanish professor decided that it would be the last day of class and between winks told us that we could come because technically there is still class, but that the students have collectively decided not to... She also canceled the final exam.

In the afternoon I had to give my final Portuguese presentation in front of all 4 classes. We sat through 4.5 hours of presentations before we were liberated to go have our Thanksgiving dinner. I made my Grandma's cornbread stuffing and it was a huge hit. Everyone complemented it so props to Mom for getting me the recipe. Tell Grandma that it was a success!

Updates from the last time I posted are coming, but I want to write about a few recent events now why they are still fresh in my head.

CAASAH-SHOT AND BITTEN

Monday got off to a bit of a rough start because I had been up late working on a paper the night before and I was so occupied finishing it that morning, that I didn’t remember about my 8:50 class until 8:40. (opps!) Somehow I cut the 40 minute walk in half and got there at 9:05 without much damage. (It was my Spanish class which generally starts 10-15 minutes late anyway.) Then after lunch I went to CAASAH, where I do my volunteer work with kids with HIV. The past few weeks I’ve seen a lot of improvements in the conditions there, but Monday was less than a positive experience. I was playing Frisbee with some kids in the playground when two of the boys got into a fight. Erique threw a rock at Mateos who responded by grabbing a huge chunk of concrete. It was easy to see where that was going so I intervened. Somewhere in the process of prying the concrete chunk from his hand and restraining him I got bit first timidly on the wrist, then forcefully on my thigh. I was alarmed at first because my thigh throbbed a good bit and I knew that if he broke the skin and had any sort of infection in his mouth, there was a chance that the virus could be transferred. I shrugged it off, thinking that there wasn’t much chance that he would have broken the skin through my jeans. After giving him a good talking to about the inappropriateness of his behavior, I moved to the baby room to cool down a bit. While I was holding one of the babies João, who I normally consider to be well-behaved, came in and started spraying water from the hose in the diaper changing room. He turns and shoots me point blank in the crotch and side. When I got home Conchita just stared at me standing in the doorway with the front of pants still soaked. It turned out to be an amusing story in retrospect, but at the time it was a bit defeating. I took a look at the bite and sprayed it with an antiseptic when I got home. Though it was swollen and red, the spray didn’t even sting so that assured me that the skin wasn’t broken. What little squirts…

(P.S. I'm not trying to show-off my leg in this picture, but I couldn't get the bite to get into focus any other way.)

PEDRA GRANDE- BLOOD AND FECES COLLECTIONS

Yesterday I went back with my class to the community, Pedra Grande, where I am doing the project from my honor’s thesis. It was a national holiday so all classes were cancelled and we took advantage of the free day… ALL of the free day in fact. (I left at 6:00AM and didn’t get back home until 10:00PM.) We learned that there is a back road that we can take to reach the community, which was great news because otherwise we would have had to carry across all our supplies across that log bridge. We had requested the health department to bring 4 chairs and 2 tables for us to use, but it turned out that the health department only brought one school desk and we had to scrounge up another table and some chairs from the community. It was a challenging request because many of the houses don’t have any furniture, but one lady offered her new kitchen table and several of the kids ran home and brought us a stool or a lawn chair. We set up a tent for the blood collections and used the big table to organize our supplies. We had 1 person recording the persons name and age and assigning an identification number (we labeled all the tubes and slides by an identification number and initials), 2 people preparing the supplies, 3 people drawing blood, 1-2 people attending to the patient after the collection (applying the bandaid, giving candy to the kids), 2 people making and labeling the slides (after the collection we put a drop of blood on each slide and extended it by running another slide at 45 degree angle along its entire length), 1-2 people organizing the people waiting, and 2 people collecting the feces. It took us about 4-4.5 hours to finish the collections and at the end of the day we had samples from 137 of 156 members of the community.

I did a bit of everything. One minute I was collecting blood, then distracting all the kids hovering around a screaming baby by taking their pictures with my digital camera, then making a slide or homogenizing the blood sample. We had to work fluidly because we were in a wide open environment where there isn’t the physical infrastructure to be able to separate those waiting their turn, those in the collection, and those who have already collected. Kids hovered around their friend during the collection, nervous little ones watched the process in horror, and kids climbed trees and ran around with the collection tube in hand. All and all, we came out well. When we got back to the lab in Salvador around 5:30PM, we organized all the samples and started running tests. Luckily only one mislabeled sample turned up. We first organized all the samples sequentially, then started running the tubes through an automated machine that screens for basic indicators of malnutrition and disease. After analyzing the results we identified the individuals whose slides we needed to examine, and tinted those slides. We finished around 9:30 PM and refrigerated all the samples neatly organized and labeled. Next week we are going to come in to look at the slides and exam the feces samples.

Look at the past 3 posts because I've added new photos!

On October 20 I went with my Anemia class to a small community called Pedra Grande in the Interior. The driver picked us up at 6AM and we spent three hours in route, plus a half hour break to eat breakfast. To reach the community we had to literally pull off the road in the middle of nowhere, walk about 20 minutes through the brush, and cross a river by way of a narrow tree trunk. We never would have found the place if we hadn’t first picked up a representative of the health department from a town nearby.

The community is a quilobolo, or a hide-away community founded by runaway slaves. It was immediately obvious upon arrival that we were dealing with an extremely impoverished and isolated population. The houses were made of mud bricks and sticks, the children ran around barefoot with dirty, bloated bodies and chickens roamed freely from the brush to the kitchen.

In teams of two we did house visits and administered our questionnaires that inquired about basic sanitation, dietary habits, and if anyone in the household showed symptoms of anemia.

After we finished the house visits we gathered everyone together and explained the project that we wanted to do. We are returning next Friday to take blood and feces samples, in subsequent visits we will do educational activities/games that address what we deem to be the principal health problems of the community, and in the final visit we will have a health fair with 2 doctors and representatives from the health department.

I’ve officially decided to abandon my research attempts with the Institute of Collective Health and instead use the data from this project. I spoke with my professor here and she is very supportive, but I’m still waiting for the okay from the home base at Tulane. I want to study the link between intestinal worms and anemia in Pedra Grande and discuss the social-historic conditions of the community that makes it susceptible to this type of anemia.

I’ve also learned how to draw blood. Within class we’ve practiced on each other and I was the first to try. Since then, I worked one morning in the lab and got 2 hours of practice!

I have Internet again! Updates coming soon.... This photo is from last weekend in Porto Seguro.