A few snippets

The canteen here at CDC/KEMRI is amazing. Today for lunch I got an enormous plate of beans, mung bean stew, vegetable stew, plantain, rice, chapattis, and sukuma wiki for about 50 cents. DELISH.

Also in food news, my housemates and I had an awesome Kenyan dinner last night prepared by a couple of the guys that we know, followed by a conversation in which the Kenyans argued that divorce does not make sense and we argued that their lack of understanding of divorce did not make sense. Not very productive in terms of changing the views of either side…

CDC/KEMRI is awesome and has seminars every Tuesday morning at 8:30 so this morning was a presentation on repeated segments of DNA and how they can impact susceptibility to various diseases. Super cool, and my MOL 342 knowledge came in handy for understanding what the guy was talking about. Yay college.

The project is going well so far, too, except for FrontlineSMS somehow totally breaking down yesterday because they used a trial version of software to create the newest update WHOOPS (now fixed apparently but I haven't yet reinstalled). I came up with a pretty good diagram of how our information transfer will go (farmer > community reporter > animal health assistants > program manager (me)) and thought through the logistics of reimbursement and data transfer. Next week is the referendum election on the new constitution (and I'm going to go up to Mpala) so everything will be totally shut down, but after that we will be training the animal health reporters in using FrontlineForms on their cell phones (that I still have to set up) to report when there is an incident in their community. We also have to train the animal health assistant response team on the clinical signs collection protocol and diagnostic sample collection for the 20ish diseases that we are concerned about for now, that's what I'm working on putting together at the moment with lots of help from my favorite book, Infectious Diseases of Livestock (3 vols.). Darryn is going to be working directly with the author/editor in Pretoria pretty soon, but he might not be able to get me a free copy OH WELL. But in any case overall I feel like I have some good short term goals set up and know the way forward a lot better than I did before.

I got to go over to help identify a couple of ticks that Alice was having trouble with, and wasn't actually that much help, but did get to see a cool Amblyomma adult that looks tiny, pale and sickly because it fed on a less than ideal host, like a chicken or something, as a nymph and therefore was not able to develop into its usual impressive adult form. COOL.

There are tiny ants on my desk that hopefully are helping me by cleaning my keyboard. But possibly they are disassembling my hard drive piece by tiny piece.