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!