Plans Plans I love Plans

Today has been good, project wise! Yesterday I became a bit overwhelmed by the idea that we scheduled our training sessions for the Animal Health Assistants and Animal Health Reporters Wednesday through Friday next week, which means I have to get all the training materials together and have everything ready for rolling out the report receiving and response doing (um, responding). But actually it feels great to have some time pressure and to force myself to reach a lot of small goals instead of doing random things towards general progress. So yesterday I stayed up late putting together a spreadsheet of how the data collection should be programmed, with all the skip patterns and stuff so that the response team is prompted to collect samples based on species of the animal (just cattle, sheep or goats for now) and the syndrome they are exhibiting (abortion/stillbirth, central nervous system signs, blood in urine, live birth). It was an awesomely fun logic problem to work through because each combination of species + syndrome needs different samples, and there is a lot of overlap in all different directions. This morning I put it all into flowcharts using a free trial of some software, and even tricked the program into not putting the "THIS WAS MADE WITH A TRIAL VERSION" label over anything important! Whoo hoo. Anyway, then I slapped together a presentation, luckily I had made some relevant slides before, and presented on my project (ADSARS – Animal Disease Surveillance and Response System) at a mobile technology working group meeting. This group has met once or twice before, and so the meeting started off with some discussion of progress towards the set up of a system where people can use the web browsers on their mobile phones to submit forms of data that can then be accessed from the web, which is potentially awesome for centralizing health data. Anyway, I might work with those guys at some point to try to set up a similar system for our lab results to be sent back to the response team so they can inform the farmers as soon as possible of the results. The group seems like it will be an amazing resource, everyone is interested in helping everyone out and seeing how different technologies work. We then met with the programmers and made them totally stressed about the fact that we want the sample collection program done in 2 weeks, maybe 3 (so that maybe we can start collecting data before Darryn leaves for South Africa). I really want to work closely with the programmers (Alan and Noel) but I feel like they are pretty skeptical of me since I am always dressed in grungy field clothes in the office (oops) and I don't have any authority. I really enjoyed the programming class I took and I also really enjoyed working through the logic spreadsheet for the program but they are total experts so I don't know if I would actually be helpful other than providing some impetus to get the work done. We'll see, I'm going to sit in on their meeting on Thursday I think.

So basically it felt great to really hammer out some progress due to imminent deadlines, and hopefully tomorrow I will be able to get going on the training material and other necessary and urgent items such as installing software on 45 phones. Coetzer of Infectious Diseases of Livestock fame who I mentioned previously as being Darryn's future boss had some slides for training for this other project that we are building off of (the same project people that I will be working with in Edinburgh to set up a diagnostic toolkit) but it's entirely pictures with no text. A lot of the pictures I recognize from the book, haemorrhaged brain cross sections and gross lesions and whatnot (side note: there are WAY too many letters in British spellings of medical terms…diarrhoea, oedema, dyspnoea, anaemia). However, not actually being a vet, most of the pictures I really have no idea how to interpret. Darryn said he'll go through and make some captions for me so I don't have to flip aimlessly through thousands of pages attempting to match pictures. Today I also started to gain more confidence in terms of this being my project and feeling like I am getting things done.

Okay but in the big picture another great accomplishment today was creating a broad and tentative timeline for the rest of the year. What I hope to have implemented before I leave in December, so that in January I can get going on creating a diagnostic system in Edinburgh, and then have the system up and running at full-ish capacity in March and April, which hopefully means things will be going smoothly enough for me to visit OuagaDOUGou then and, as Darryn pointed out, find another job for next year L. And then I'll spend the last month or two analyzing the system with the human disease data. OH BOY.

So there, I hope that information was followable and now everyone probably has a slightly better idea of what I'm actually doing. I keep meaning to inform you all in my blog posts that I really would love to hear feedback in the form of e-mails or just comments or some kind of contact, because although by writing a blog I am sort of contacting a ton of people at once I receive much less feedback than if I were sending e-mails to a few people individually. So say hello, please. Tell me what you are up to!