My Day

     Now that I have been here over a month, I thought it might be a good time to talk about my daily routine. There isn’t really a routine but some things are fairy consistent. I wake up about 6 am. The sun is already up and there is movement on the road outside the house. Workers and vehicles arrive for the day’s work. The chickens are making a lot of noise. You get used to it. Did I mention the smells yet? Christianville is a working farm. In addition to the chickens, there is a herd of goats here. The herd moves between pastures next to the lab to down back of the guesthouse. Some mornings I hear the goats, too. Some mornings I’m not sure if what I smell is the chickens or the goats, or both. It doesn’t matter. You get used to that, too.

Sunrise

     I take a shower. I’ve gotten used to taking cold showers. After I shower, I do some pushups, some stretching, some yoga. Some mornings I get up earlier and go for a run. I have not done that too much lately. The road is too rocky and the circuit is basically a boring path back and forth. I take my doxycycline (anti-malaria), hang my bath towel on the line in the yard to dry and walk over to the dining hall for breakfast. We drink coffee while we wait for breakfast to be ready at 7:15 am. Everyone who is present joins hands and someone volunteers to say a prayer. That person gets to be first in line to eat.  There is a long table with the food. We pass along both sides of the table to serve ourselves. Later I will do another post on the meals (with photos) at Christianville. People wander in and serve themselves. We talk about our plans for the day. If there is a mission group present, we’ll talk with them, ask where they are from, what they are doing in Haiti, just get to know them a bit and make them feel welcome. Mission groups come and go. They stay at the guesthouse (also known as the Fish House or Hotel West Virginia) for a week or 10 days. There may be five people or 15 people. As we finish eating, everyone helps collect the dishes and bring them into the kitchen where the ladies wash the dishes.

     After breakfast, Meer and I head over to the lab. The lab techs come in about 8 am. Meer checks to see which clinics called in and where he needs to send Makendy to pick up samples. We get specimens from Léogâne, Petit Goâve, Grand Goâve, and Jacmel. I don’t do anything with the samples. The Haitian techs do all the work. I turn on my laptop and check my email. I pull up the list of emails for which I am awaiting a response. If it is taking too long, I’ll send out another email. I check with Meer to see if we going to meet anyone today. Some days Meer and I drive out to meet people. We drive out to introduce ourselves to the staff at the clinics that we work with. We want to establish a personal relationship with our partners. Sometimes we will drive out to meet someone new to establish a partnership, to learn what they are doing, to explain to them what we are doing, to see if there are ways we can work together. Basically we are getting the word out to the community that the UF-EPI Haiti Lab 1 is here and explaining what we do. It really does help to cultivate that personal connection.  

     Back in the lab, I work at my laptop. I write protocols for our surveillance projects. I review research progress from people in my lab in Bethesda. I write proposals for funding. I write emails to collaborators. I write to my colleagues in Florida and in Haiti. I send out requests to meet with different people and organizations in Haiti as I try to build up my network. I also spend a lot of time setting up projects, developing ideas of things to do. It is crazy and fun!!! Meer and I just toss around ideas of what a microbiology laboratory can do in Haiti. What about parasites? I didn’t think I’d get into parasites but now I’m learning about schistosomiasis and reading up on it. I spent most of the day one Saturday writing a pilot protocol to test for schistosomiasis. I'm not a parasitologist so I need to bring in some people I know at USU and the University of Georgia as collaborators. Why not food studies? Meer and I talked about looking for Campylobacter and Salmonella in chickens. They raise lots of chickens and produce lots of eggs in Christianville.  Maybe we should look and see if the chickens are colonized with Campylobacter or Salmonella. But how do you get cloacal swabs from a chicken? I don’t know but I know a guy who knows chickens – my Ph.D. mentor, Roy Curtiss III. So I sent Roy an email and he told me how (there is a YouTube video). 

     There is so much that can be done here. The limiting factors are personnel (getting the right people to work on the project), material (it's not easy to get equipment and supplies into Haiti), and money. At times I almost feel like I’m back in Bethesda writing grants. I spend a lot of time sending out emails begging companies for donations or reduced pricing for material and supplies. We are doing things on a shoestring and the work here really needs a much larger investment. But I love it down here. We're going to get a lot of good stuff done.

     Lunch is at 12:00 noon. Same routine as at breakfast. On my way to lunch I go into our yard to fold up my bath towel and bring it back into the house. After lunch, it’s back to the lab. Sometimes during the day, one of my kids will jump in on Google Chat and we exchange messages for a while. I really enjoy that. It keeps me connected with them and what they are doing. We also Skype. That is great (except when the Internet connection is poor and keeps dropping the call). But I still miss them.

     Dinner is at 5:30 pm. After dinner, I grab a flashlight from the house and head back to the lab and continue working on my laptop. It usually rains. We are in the last month of the rainy season. I work until about 10:00 pm and then pack up the laptop, say goodnight to Meer (he works until after midnight) and walk back home in the dark. The nights have gotten noticeably cooler this week. I brush my teeth and rinse with bottled water from our Gift of Water household water treatment system. I have not used the tap water since I got here. I have not been using the bed net. I think we have our mosquito problem under control since Meer and I spent a whole day taping around all of the window screens with duct tape and did a thorough house cleaning. I am sleeping a lot better.

     Time for bed. 

     Bonne nuit, les enfants. Dormez bien.

Sunset