Work

I realize that a lot of people dont really know what "public health" is. Sometimes even I don't. So I am going to try to summarize it and then I am going to say what I do so that maybe people have a better idea. Public health is more or less trying to protect entire populations of people from getting sick. Doctors treat diseases. Public health professionals try to stop people from getting sick in the first place. So we run family planning clinics, conduct education campaigns about smoking, develop vaccines, and study the effects of pollution on cancer. Those are examples of "public health". There are a bunch of different things you can focus on, for example I have a friend who is studying health policy, another one studying infectious disease epidemiology, and I am studying reproductive health. So for me, I try to learn about what affect participation in a microcredit organization has on contraceptive use among poor women in Bangladesh, what barriers women in Afghanistan face to accessing safe birth delivery services, or whether women who escape sex trafficking in Thailand are able to integrate into society or face deportation and retrafficking. So those are public healthy things that we do. My work on them mostly involves sitting at a computer, crunching numbers and looking for patterns, but it also involves developing surveys, conducting interviews, or traveling to sites and actually seeing what the organizations we work with do (although that doesnt get to happen all that often sadly). So for those of you who were never really sure what in the world I was doing, and to clarify for myself a little bit, those are three things that I am working on right now.

Apparently people read this

I dont know that people I know read this but apparently people I dont know read it when they google me. Thats creepy. I guess if thats the case maybe i should spend more time writing on it. But since I havent written anything in almost a year, that seems unlikely. Anyway, I figured that I would just update the picture and the title. Since I am not in Africa and sadly will likely not be going back for some time. But I do have some trips in the works (SPAIN in one month and a half!!!) and possibly some other locations this summer. Potential dissertation opportunities are popping up, but its best not to get too excited. But here are some words to throw around... Nigeria, Burma, Thailand. Just putting it out there...