march madness

while i missed out on college basketball this year, march was still a pretty crazy month filled with a vast amount of both work and travel.

work last month centered on ebrms: the eastern burma retrospective mortality survey. before i got here, surveyors were trained to go to villages inside eastern burma and administer a survey that asked people about their family's health and any human rights violations they may have endured.

this is not an easy task! surveyors had to use random sampling techniques within villages, code each question correctly, and follow specific protocols when traveling to preselected villages was deemed unsafe. obviously, problems arose and will need to be sorted out in the data.

i've been working with the burma medical association to develop systems to both clean and enter the data into access so that we can analyze it. this is otherwise known as "fun" for a nerdy person who loves organization. after much training, system and form development, flowcharts, and illustrative examples, the data has been processed. the best part is yet to come - the analysis! all i can say is stay tuned.

adding to the craziness that was march, i also spent a week in vietnam. i visited hanoi and halong bay in addition to doing some work and picking up some supplies for our malaria programs. after that, cathy came from dc for a visit and we traveled around thailand together. sweet! we visited bangkok, koh chang, chiang mai, mae sot, and sukhothai. it was amazing.

pictures to follow.