Helping Puno Headline Animator

Showing posts with label Fieldwork. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fieldwork. Show all posts

Sunday, October 3, 2010

First Week in Puno

Rural Expedition

Sunrise
Puno is not what i imagined, it´s way better than that. Waking up everyday with a fully shining sun around 5 AM, clear blue sky...

It´s been about 2 weeks siince i first came here, and i have to tell you that i LOVED it.
There are many things to accomplish in health, besides that the surrounding environment is just impressive!!

Rural community
I heard someting in here about "Kharisiri", that term if referred to an urban leyend, where evil, possessed natives  or foreigners specially "gringos" steal peoples body fat. This was so interesting, actually a collegue of mine doing environmental research at rural communities, had a problem with this kharsiri thing. The community thought that this fellows where kharisiris, they had this huge PM, MIE measurements gadgets, those things had to be for 24-48 hours inside the house. The people from that community believed that the MIE could steal ther fat and blood (vital energy), so they went crazy and vanished the researchers from that place.
It´s so amazing how deep cultural believes can be, dictating social behaviour, oH well, this is so Public Health research going on!!

Next step, getting to know the community within cultural believes in order to avoid this problems again.

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Getting the Fieldworkers Trained

Hey, this is Joao again!!

Well, it´s been a while since the fogarty experience at NIH, still waiting in Lima to go to Puno, this last few weeks have been very intense..
The three research sites for a NHLBI poject have gather in Pampas from San Juan de Miraflores, shanty town in perurban area from lima. My mentors came to ge the fieldworkers trained in here. The pulmonary research lines have been drawn and setup. Tons of fieldworkers started getting spirometry among other procedures. Quite something to have three sites running at the same time, not too many weeks for training and then pilots all over the sites in order to get the project running accordingly to GCP and ethics, mostly fo quality control and assurance.
Hope to get things going well!! Life so far has been wonderful and crazy, just Love It.
Now Echos, cIMT and other things are comming in the next weeks...yay!!!