I’m beginning my fourth week here on Mfangano Island and I’ve come to learn so much about the island (and it’s neighboring islands) already. I’ve also had the pleasure of meeting so many kind and welcoming people since my arrival! I get to spend most of my days working at a place that serves as the center of the community, the Ekialo Kiona Center. Referred to as the “EK Center” by locals, the Ekialo Kiona Center provides the space for local community members to come and enjoy unlimited and free access to a number of resources and services available to all individuals who agree to participate in regular HIV testing and counseling. The Ekialo Kiona Center is also staffed with a wonderful research team that I have the pleasure of working with throughout the summer. They have been great in providing support for my summer research project thus far! I’ve also had the opportunity to spend some of my time in the field working with the center’s nutritionist, participating in nutrition screenings that take place at the local primary schools here on the island. In the few weeks that I’ve been here I’ve also come to witness how much the people of Mfangano rely on Lake Victoria. Serving as the largest lake on the continent, residents rely heavily on the lake’s ecosystem, as it provides provides for local food security with the Nile perch and tilapia being the primary sources of fish. The beautiful Lake Victoria can also be seen from any spot on the island! I feel blessed to have the opportunity to partake in the current research here at the Ekialo Kiona Center that focuses primarily on nutrition, health, and food security. Data collection is coming to a close this week and it’s been a great experience working with the research team so far. Things are moving along very smoothly with my research project. I’ll be spending the next few weeks completing data entry and beginning my data analysis that will all serve as a key component to the overall nutrition program evaluation project.
I’m very excited for the remainder of my time here on the island and look forward to sharing more of my summer research experience here on Mfangano! Erokamano! Folasade
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Pura Vida! Which means hello/goodbye/thank you/pretty much whatever you want in Costa Rica. It's been a great (and busy) couple weeks working in Zarcero but I am loving my fieldwork. After a pretty intense week of training at Universidad Nacional in Heredia, near Costa Rica's capital San José, we all headed out to Zarcero to start the fieldwork. In addition to myself, there are three Costa Rican and two Swiss students/professionals working on the team. While living and working with the same six people each day has its challenges, it's been really fun to get to know each other and see how each of our strengths and previous experiences can make the project better.
As part of the training in Heredia, each of us practiced the three different stations of the project and our PI worked with us to decide who would fit best in each station. I am working on the neurobehavioral station, which means that after each farmers completes a pretty thorough questionnaire to assess their occupational pesticide exposure, they come over to me and we complete a couple tests and I ask them numerous questions about different neurological symptoms that could be associated with pesticide exposures. The activities include things like repeating various series of numbers forward and backwards, completing timed tests, and activities to assess fine motor function. I really get to interact with the participants in my station and have to work to establish a certain level of openness, as many of the questions I ask cover fairly sensitive topics. We hit the ground running with outreach and recruitment right when we got to Zarcero. We have two local farmers working with us to help recruit farmer workers and farm owners for the project, but quickly discovered many of the challenges in conducting fieldwork like this, including the unpredictable schedules of farmers and the occasional forgotten meeting. After a couple days on the project, we began to develop a schedule to call farmers to remind them about the interviews in order to minimize the number of meetings to reschedule and keep on track with our target number of participants, but many times we still get to a farm planning to have a certain number of interviews and learn that we won't be able to talk to that many people, usually because they have to get work in before the torrential downpour starts. Participating in this study is a fairly large commitment for the farmers- while we are able to compensate them for lost productivity while they are meeting with us, we are still asking them to give up a couple hours of their busy days. Despite some of these challenges, the majority of the farmers are excited to participate and share their experiences with us- I always end my station by thanking them for their time and telling them they can go over to the third station and they always formally thank me, even though they are essentially volunteering to talk with us for a couple hours about their work experience. We have walked away from interviews multiple times with bundles of fresh produce or been invited in for “snacks”, which usually turns out to be more of a feast. Between the participants I’ve talked to during the interviews and the people I’ve worked with on our study team, I have become convinced that Costa Ricans are some of the nicest and most genuine people. One of the Costa Ricans working on the team, who is lucky enough to be my roommate during the project, was wearing a nice pair of earrings one day and I complemented her on them and she took them out of her ears and right away offered them to me. When I laughed a little and insisted she keep them, she just kind of shrugged her shoulders and said, well that’s what we do. While we work hard during the week- often working from about 7 AM to 8 PM to get in interviews, enter data, plan future visits, and tie up any loose ends, we also get the opportunity to travel on the weekends. In just the couple weeks that I’ve been here, I’ve gone zip lining, rock climbing (sort of-I didn’t get that far), saw a monkey try to snatch a purse in Manuel Antonio national park, hiked to a waterfall, relaxed in some hot springs, and soaked in as much as I can of this beautiful country. Peru is considered one of the six cradles of civilization, where urbanization accompanied agricultural innovation. Of these six civilizations, it is the only one south of the hemisphere. For centuries, Peruvian culture and livelihood has revolved around impressive agricultural feats such as domesticating potatoes, quinoa, and corn. Throughout the past centuries, Peru has undergone profound changes; examining the cultivation and consumption of food is one such medium to spotlight this societal transition. A good friend of mine told me that ethnographic research is hanging out. For 15 weeks, I will actively “hang out” and document my trip using my camera lens to answer my main research question: How have dietary changes in Trujillo, Peru contributed to the rise of noncommunicable diseases in Trujillo?
-Shane Fallon, MPH Nutrition '17 I have just begun my fourth week of work in Brazil. I have settled into a consistent work flow here which involves spending most of my time in the health post that serves the Preventório community in Niterói. I work alongside doctors, nurses, nurse technicians, and health workers. In the health post I am collecting various data regarding health indicators and will apply this information to the UTI data that I am also collecting. I also spend a few afternoons a week processing UTI samples in a lab at the Federal Fluminense Univeristy in Niterói.
As Claire has mentioned, I am working here with both April Peña (CEND Fellow) and Claire Boone (CGPH Fellow). We have had the unique opportunity to interact with local community members in a Favela (an informal slum residence). Along with my work in Urinary Tract Infections I have had the opportunity to hear from local community members the barriers that they face in access to healthcare. One example is the lack of access to health infrastructure for persons living with physical disabilities in a very steep and hilly Favela. Our health post has about twenty steep steps that you must climb to get to the health post. This is just one of the many problems that troubles all of the health professionals in the health post. While here, I hope to also work more closely with the health professionals to find some creative ways to overcome some of these barriers. Emily Bom dia do Brasil!
This is my fourth week working in Niterói, Brazil. Niterói is to Rio de Janeiro as Berkeley is to San Francisco. It has been great to be able to explore the big city on weekends, but work in a slightly calmer, less busy city during the week. Emily Pearman (CGPH Fellow), April Pena (CEND Fellow), and I are all working in the favela, or urban slum, community of Morro do Preventório. We work at two government-run health posts, both staffed with incredible and resilient community health workers, nurses, and doctors who have helped us get on our feet since arriving in Brazil. It is a very interesting time to be in Brazil – with the Olympics quickly approaching, the Zika epidemic, and very the unstable political climate. These topics come up regularly at work – both with our fellow health workers, and during patient interviews. My primary project is conducting a survey examining the social determinants of diabetes in the slum community. My first week was spent piloting and editing the survey, and data collection is now well underway. A noticeable number of people we have interviewed for the study have complained of recent Zika, Dengue, or Chikungunya viral infection (it is hard, if not impossible to know which virus affected them). We recently spoke to a woman whose arm is now completely immobilized due to viral infection, which has rendered her unable to work for the past three months. Stories like this are aplenty in Preventório, but there is hope, as the incidence of infections from aedes aegypti (the mosquito which transmits Zika, Dengue, and Chikungunya viruses) has been rapidly decreasing in the State of Rio de Janeiro, prompting some Brazilian health professionals to – tentatively – discuss that the worst of the epidemic is behind us. Stay tuned for more updates on the diabetes project, Zika, and other work in Preventório. Claire Hello from Shinyanga! My name is Jill, I am an Epidemiology/Biostatistics MPH student spending my summer in Shinyanga, Tanzania. After a long journey, I am happy to report that my first week here has been really wonderful - I have already met so many kind and wonderful people and am excited for what the rest of the summer has to bring!
This summer I will be spending time both in the field and in the office, which is located at Shinyanga Hospital within the Regional Medical Office. Everyone who works at the office has been so welcoming, and I am so thrilled to be surrounded by such kind and hardworking people. I will be working mostly with Agatha, who is the director for many different projects here, in conducting my CGPH project to study the health effects of heavy load carrying in women in Shinyanga Region. We will collect both qualitative and quantitative information using surveys to interview women, scales to weigh their loads, pictures and videos to characterize their posture and gait, and devices to capture biometric data. With this information we hope to assess the potential health effects of heavy load carrying in women in Shinyanga; an especially salient topic in East Africa where mechanized transportation is scarce and women and girls bear most of the carrying burden. We have already begun to lay the groundwork for implementing the study by investigating possible locations to recruit and enroll women, and through having conversations with locals. It has been really exciting work, and it has only just begun! Looking forward to keeping you all updated throughout the summer! Badai! Amosi!
My name is Folasade Wilson-Anumudu and in exactly one week I’ll be heading to the beautiful East African country of Kenya. My summer research project is taking me to Mfangano Island, a remote island located in Lake Victoria, Western Kenya. This summer, I will be working alongside Organic Health Response, a community-based organization, on a project that will evaluate the benefits of a social network nutrition program within communities of the Island. More specifically, my work this summer will consist of both quantitative and qualitative research, as I will be conducting an analysis with data collected from nutrition knowledge questionnaires and providing support in the implementation of focus group discussions conducted with participants of the social network nutrition program groups. With some much needed packing that still needs to be done and only a week away, I am somewhat anxious, yet very excited and thrilled for my arrival to Kenya, as this will be my first trip to an East African country. Moreover, I feel truly blessed to have the opportunity to spend my summer immersing myself in a completely new culture and environment. From the cuisine, to the culture, music, and weekly Luo language sessions, I am looking forward to everything Kenya has to offer. I look forward to sharing my summer experience with you over these next 12 weeks! Stay tuned for more updates, stories and photos! Hello!
Hello!
My name is Carly and this summer I’m headed to Zarcero, Costa Rica to work on a project in collaboration with the Central American Institute for Studies on Toxic Substances (IRET). The main objectives of this project are to evaluate occupational pesticide exposures among organic and conventional farmworkers and to determine if there is an association between occupational pesticide exposure and the risk of certain respiratory illnesses, neurobehavioral disorders and cerebral cortex function, and various cardiometabolic outcomes such as obesity and high blood pressure among conventional and organic farmworkers. When I was an undergraduate student at Carthage College, I spent a summer working in a small agricultural community in Guatemala called Nuevo Horizonte. I learned a lot in Nuevo and one of the things that became most clear from working with farmers in the community is that there was very little education regarding different organic and conventional farming techniques and extremely limited access to information about the dangers of pesticide exposures. The farmers in the community would spray pesticides with no masks, gloves, or other protective equipment, and while they told me they would often feel physically sick for days after spraying pesticides, most farmers held a belief that if a small amount of pesticides help improve crop yields, then using a lot of pesticides must be better. I’m really interested to compare what I learned from the farmers in Nuevo to those working in Zarcero and to gain experience working in agricultural populations to learn more about the barriers to minimizing and preventing pesticide exposures. Starting tomorrow, we have a week of training in San Jose to practice working on the different parts of the project, including conducting the interview and assessing for various clinical outcomes. After this week, we’ll head out to Zarcero and get started with the fieldwork. I’m extremely excited to work on this project and can’t wait to meet the rest of the research team. I am actually writing this post from Houston, where I missed a connection for my flight to Costa Rica due to weather issues, and have a flight re-booked to San Jose tonight-fingers crossed everything works out this time! Thanks for reading and I can’t wait to update you with stories and pictures! |
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