At long last, the NEW post has been released!!!!

Going for a walk with Francis' and Komolo to go look at the dams





I <3 This NGO, I want a t-shirt sooooo badly




Ooh, it's both exciting and shiny!!! And it has that new post smell..which is sort of gross...

So lets see, I think the last post was last week, so I'll try and remember things which you will all like and think are awesome. Last Sunday we rolled out to my friend Francis' place where his mom cooked us an awesome dinner, my other friend Samuel Komolo joined us too, they are both my colleagues at the Millennium Village Project and have helped me out a bunch. So we were headed to the place where he lives, which is a slum, on the way to the super-huge mall called MegaCity! It doesn't have the exclamation point, but I feel it adds a certain je ne sais quoi to the place, besides it's called MegaCity, it feels like it SHOULD have an exclamation point. Oh yeah, so the place we were going by on the way was called something in Ki-Swahili which I don't remember, but it translates literally into English as "Hide Your Ass", which I think is awesome. I guess the origin was that some Mzungu originally named the place Pinocchio, but then it was converted and that's what they came up with. I love that I get to look at the Hide your Ass Community Center every time I go to MegaCity!. So, we got to his place and he took us around to look at the dams which work to protect much of the land from flooding in the rainy season. Apparently the swampland it has created is home to many Hippos (Kiboko in Ki-Swahili), they come out at night and menace the people and destroy crops and such, and if you meet a Hippo they are very good at charging straight forward but can't corner for crap, so you should run in not a straight line. So we had an awesome dinner and then headed for home.

Monday I headed back out to the field, and did some more interviews. The more I do the better I feel about them and the less I feel like I forget to ask. So far I have visited 7 of the 9 health facilities here and I hope to finish up the last 2 tomorrow. Not too much to report from the visits, though I have some photos I will post.

On Tuesday I had a great meeting with James at MVP, we went over the current plans for the program and he had some really great input. Sometimes it's really nice when you are so close to a project to get a little outside perspective. So we ended up expanding the program quite a bit and ditched the automated schedules for manual ones to begin with and then we can look at the data later to see if there are patterns. This gives the software much more flexibility.

We are also going to have the CHWs go out and do a registration drive and put the Mothers' health IDs for Childcount on a sticker inside the front cover of the maternal health booklet as I had realized on Monday that the patients donot know their health ID at the moment which is a huge problem given that I am using that as the primary piece of ID for the system. We solved that though and tonight I went through and made the three new forms that will be needed for the health centers. There is also a new CD4count machine coming to the subdistrict hospital soon and we figured out a way to manually capture that information until a more automated solution can be put into place. Oh and Katie was a TA in the phlebotomy lab in med school and Komolo asked her to help do some trainings for doing blood draws.

Today katie and Claire went to the field with me,which was awesome and at the second health center the driver was waiting and asked us to be fast so as I did my interview I sent Francis out to take photos of whatever he thought would be interesting for my report. I am a bit shy with taking photos, especially at the health centers, Francis is not, and I think I got much more good stuff by sending him out with the camera. I also think that people are less shy when it's a Kenyan taking the photos. Anyway, I though about it, and sent him home with the camera, and asked him to just take photos of whatever he thought was interesting that night. I'm pretty stoked to get the results and I think i might repeat the experiment with him and also with other people i trust over the course of my time here. I'll post someof the shots soon.

Okay, well tomorrow I am meeting with the programmers and we will set out the specific course of action to be taken beginning Monday, and then it's off to the field to finish up with the health centers.

Oh, and I can't believe I forgot this, Yanis who has led the effort to get this program set up presented a few slides I made last weekend of the work i am doing here at the UNAIDS HQ in Geneva. I am pretty stoked about that and I guess they must have liked it as he said there was good news! I am keeping my fingers crossed that this means we will be continuing this project after I graduate in December. Okay folks, It's late and i have a meeting in the morning as well as a ton of writing for my report I have been putting off to go and visit the Impala sanctuary with Claire (I shook hands with a baboon! I really need to talk about that when I have the pics uploaded) so I'm going to go and leave you to the rest of whatever you were supposed to be doing. Oh and I totally missed the planning meeting yesterday in Yala, butno one told me it was happening!!!! Crap, I need to makeit to thenext one so my project is assigned time, we are still hoping to go live with the alpha in about 2 weeks. Okay, I'm really going now.

No

Really

I'm going to go

Stop reading

I might be really tired and a little loopy

Are you still reading?

s'en allez!

Goodnight