A couple days after my family joined me in Taiwan, we went swimming in the rural mountains of Miaoli County, where my mom grew up. In the 15 minutes between emerging from the water and putting on insect repellent, my 10-year-old kid racked up over 100 intensely itchy insect bites. “We didn’t see any mosquitoes!” …
Aloha from Hawai’i. I am being silly and exploring nerdy visual-design-data resources online while the sun, ocean, beach and valley beckon outside. Before I turn off this computer, I want to share this awesome resource with y’all (which my neighbor-friend Brian Sullivan sent to me):http://www.gapminder.org/world/ http://static.videoegg.com/ted/flash/loader.swf
[You can play a short, 6 min, version of the FACES documentary here. Viva YouTube!] It feels good to be doing creative work again. I’m excited to spend my time brainstorming about sequences, soundtracks, what clips to take out of the 10 hours of raw footage I have to work with. The process is amazing …
What makes someone want to come to Kenya? Someone not from here, not black, with no family members nearby, with no connection to the people and community aside from work? For those of us who struggle with having meaning in life, global health work can feel like an answer. The US (and I imagine most …
I spent a week in Suba District, the district of Nyanza Province in western Kenya with the highest HIV prevalence of Kenya (35-40%) and where FACES is training HIV providers. There is nothing that I can write that would capture the feeling of being there. It was astounding in every way: the beauty, the rawness, …
[at left: Dr. Joe Mamlin, lead clinician in the AMPATH program and me in his garden, Eldoret] AMPATH is its own organism. It’s grown from the 2,000 patients in 2004, when I was last in Eldoret, and just starting a few clinics outside of the main referral center clinic. It now sees over 40,000 patients …
Home visits represent to me the quintessential experience of being a doctor. I get an amazing diversity of background and information about a patient from observing them in their home environment rather than in the clinic. I get the privilege of seeing how they eat, how the sleep, what they do during the day, how …
[photo at left: Traditional Birth Attendants being trained to do PMTCT for HIV+ pregnant women in Turbo Village. They represent an important piece of task-shifting to community-based members. They also represent a large cadre of people who are not trained in traditional university settings but who are doing great public health work. They reach women …
