July 6: I really want a salad

This week isn’t nearly as exciting as past weeks - we mainly stayed in the office to work on writing our manuscripts. I think the worst part of research must be trying to write a paper on it. As tedious as the data manipulation is, I at least feel like I’m doing something. Writing is a lot of re-reading articles, looking up new articles, typing a sentence every now and then, and two days later not having anything of substance. A lot of what I wrote will probably be modified by the time we get to the end product anyway. I’m becoming pretty versed in the studies of maternal anthropometry and low birth weight. One article I found goes through every factor from socioeconomics to airplane noise to various activities that can release oxytocin and analyzed each for its relation to early birth and low birth weight. The researcher is my hero at the moment.

Once we get the data analyzed and I can motivate to write the rest of the paper, it should be a valuable addition to the pool of literature on the subject. Nothing like this has been done in South Africa except some small studies in 1990 that briefly touched on one aspect of my project. I also haven’t seen anybody look at illness, which is what I’ll be doing.

On Wednesday we went out to the field with a supervisor. We visited one house on a mountain that took a lot of effort to get to so we could get the mother to sign a form. On the way there we saw a barefoot girl pushing a wheelbarrow of water jugs, obviously struggling, and a little barefoot boy pulling a large jug on a piece of plastic tied with rope. They’d filled their jugs from a reservoir that was apparently shared with the other homes in the area. Once we’d gotten to the correct house, I realized that they were the children of the mother we were visiting. The supervisor we went with helped the girl bring her wheelbarrow in, but the little boy had dragged his jug over before I could go help him.

The mother was in the backyard making bricks from clay she’d dug from the ground. I’ve seen a lot of these brick makers, so it’s a popular way to make money and the material is right there in everyone’s backyard. I wanted to take a picture of her making the bricks, but she only let me take one standing next to her. I tried to engage her children, she had four of them including a little two-year-old, but they didn’t understand English and didn’t respond to anything I said. The only way I could get any sort of reaction was to play peek-a-boo with a girl who looked like she was five or six until she got embarrassed and ran away.

We eventually found ourselves at a meeting place in one of the villages we’d visited before. The women and men who live in the villages and go out to collect the data for the study everyday were gathering for a meeting and to get some papers from Univen. One of them gave me and my roommate a stick of sugar cane to chew on. There’s a correct way to peel it with your teeth and chew out the sugar, but I couldn’t do it and some of the fieldworkers had a good laugh at my expense. After a couple hours, I still only had a small amount of it done and a large mess.

The meeting took 1.5 hours and I couldn’t understand most of it, so I amused myself by trying to peel my sugar cane with a knife (failed) and watching the courtyard. Since we’d arrived, children were coming in every now and then with plastic containers. I’d spoken to a few of them(ages 5,6,9, and 12) and asked them to dance for me since they are really good at it. By the middle of the meeting the yard was filled with barefoot and dusty children holding containers and playing. I was wondering if it was a school or something when a lady pulled a huge bucked of pap out of a shed. The children lined up from smallest to teenagers and each received a portion of the pap and some sort of meat. They had been fed and left within 15 minutes. I asked someone what was going on, thinking it was a community kitchen or something, but was told that all of the children are orphans. A few ladies cook for them once a day and mete out food into the plastic containers the children bring. Nobody could tell me where the kids are all day long. The children I’d gotten to talk to me were part of that group. If I’d known, I probably would have snatched up an adorable little boy playing with two sticks tied together like an airplane. His name was something that sounded like Romeo and he could dance.

Since Wednesday was the 4^th of July, all nine of us UVA students decided to have a braai. I’d volunteered to make squash on the braai, but there wasn’t any yellow squash. Instead, someone brought me these little round green ones that looked like little watermelons on the outside and like cantaloupe on the inside and smelled like pumpkin. I made them like I’d have made yellow squash, but they didn’t turn out too well. Someone also braaied sweet potatoes. I normally can’t stand sweet potatoes, but the ones here are really good and I can’t get enough of them. I’m even cool just eating a boiled one plain.

We blasted country music and anything else that was strictly American that we had between us, probably to the disgruntlement of the rest of the park and someone tried to make fireworks by flicking matches over flint. I can honestly say that we were the most American people in South Africa.

On Thursday we went to the microbiology lab to see if they were doing anything cool. They process all of the biological samples that MAL-ED collects and screen the stools for parasites. We’d just missed their Thursday-morning ELISA session, but we briefly watched one of the lab girls stain and screen a stool sample. She said that it’s the most boring part of the job because they never find parasites, which is exactly the reason I’m not doing a project on them. Again, good for the kids, bad for the people who want parasites to look at. The girl took out an old sample that was guaranteed to have something in it and found a cyst for us to look at. It was E. coli (the parasite, not the bacteria) and we could just barely get the resolution to see the nucleus. The lab manager promised to call us the next time they run a PCR or an assay so we can watch.

Two of the water filter students left this morning to go home, so we had a farewell dinner at an Indian restaurant nearby. It’s owned by the same person who owned the other Indian restaurant, but that one closed down and this one was much cleaner. We had mounds of naan and ate aloo paneer with our hands. Very good dinner. And I quite enjoy the social acceptability of eating with your hands.

We’ve not been at a loss for decent food, but the variety is lacking and a lot of the food I want to eat isn’t safe. I’m also tired of finding pieces of beetles and worms in my food. The first thing I want to do after taking a shower once I’m back is to eat the biggest salad with all the raw vegetables I can fit into my stomach.

Today we decided to walk to the complex for lunch (I don’t trust the cafeteria anymore after almost eating a worm in their rice last week). We walked halfway down the main road to a large store called Game with a very pink colour scheme. It was a huge Walmart-esque store that was the cleanest store I’ve seen yet. They had a limited selection of food and had a huge appliance/electronics/anything you might need to live section. I don’t know why we were never told of this store before since it’s so much cleaner and they have things that we didn’t know we could get here. I got a little too excited to find a set of Avengers cups, but they were plastic and made in China.

Other than that, it’s been an uneventful week. I started the psychology class I’m taking online and I think it’ll be pretty easy if I can get enough internet to stream the lectures. It gives me something to do with my brain besides review physics for the MCAT. 

Tomorrow we’re going to a braai at our advisor’s house. She’d asked what we could eat as vegetarians, but I expect we’ll be eating a lot of pap and butternut squash.