Monday, August 11, 2008

Dessert with no dinner

The way HIV/AIDS-related programs are executed in Mozambique often reminds me of the episode of M*A*S*H in which Major Winchester donates gourmet chocolate to the Korean orphanage, only to learn that the head of the orphanage has traded the stuff on the black market for food staples like rice and beans. "Forgive me," he says, when he's realized his mistake. "I have given dessert to children who have had no dinner."

You'll see what I mean when you read this. When the magnitude of the HIV/AIDS epidemic became known, the international community flocked to the aid of affected countries, pouring money into programs for prevention, treatment, and impact mitigation. This is most definitely a good thing: helping sick people, and preventing people from getting sick, is a valid goal, particularly in the case of AIDS, which affects people of the age who otherwise would be earning money for their families and taking care of children.

But whether it's because of these ties to economic development; or because of the threat of AIDS spreading from Africa to our own safe and cozy homelands; or because of the ability of this disease to capture the imaginations and hearts of donors, AIDS has unfairly taken top priority on the international aid agenda. It's not uncommon to visit a hospital in which the beautiful, new areas dedicated to AIDS care sit beside the other wards, which are overcrowded, crumbling, and understaffed. Or, teenagers' curricula on STIs and sexual health, often NGO-run, are fine-tuned based on international best-practices -- but the students have had no adequate preparation in areas like the germ theory of disease or population biology, which are essential to their understanding HIV's transmission and spread through populations.

Or, like in the article linked to above, people with inadequate nutritional intake are given expensive and potent medications to treat their illness. I work in HIV/AIDS research, and I believe that it is indeed an international emergency. But we in the international development, research, and health communities need to ensure that dinner is provided before dessert.

Friday, August 8, 2008

Validation; or, The Next Level

It might be that it's Friday night, and that I get to hang out with some old Peace Corps friends later, and that I get to spend some lazy, pampered days in New York soon, but I'm happy right now.

I had an extremely validating conference call this afternoon. For the past two weeks or so I've been poking away at my computer, forcing myself to generate code that might work to turn out numbers that might be vaguely relevant or useful or correct. If this sounds like the wrong way to do research, welcome to data triangulation. We look at lots of numbers and try to pull out something meaningful from them.

Problem is, I've never been trained in triangulation -- I'd never even heard the word in this context before my first meeting with my thesis advisor. I figured someone would clearly explain to me how the process works in time for me to present the findings of said triangulation to a high-level group of researchers here.

So far nothing has become a whole lot clearer, and I'm on my own for the presentation, which is next week. The main higher-up on the project, though, R, always seems to have something in his head. He's said several times that we'll need to "take it to The Next Level" with the help of analysts at UCSF, which drives me crazy because this project, as my master's thesis, should mostly be done by me. Which is why it was so nice to speak to said analysts today, in a call that R missed, and learn that "The Next Level" appears to be a nebulous area existing only in R's head. The first few minutes of the call went something like this:

UCSF: "So, did you and R get a chance to talk on Wednesday?"
Me: "Yeah, we went over some scheduling issues and he gave me some tips for the presentation, but I was hoping he'd be on this call. He wants your help in taking it to the Next Level."
UCSF: "Yeah, so about that Next Level... do you have any idea what he's taking about? Because, the level you're at now... that's about the level we can work at."

Which is so great to hear. Because after 2 weeks of battling it out with Stata (and constantly checking friends' blogs and celebrity blogs), it seems that maybe I do have good instincts in this whole data analysis thing. Not that a trained professional couldn't do it 10 times faster, but I think I'm coming out with about the same results that an MPH on the project might, via the same logical routes that my thoughts have been taking over the past 2 weeks. I may not have the organization or confidence or refinement of a seasoned professional, but at least I feel that I could someday.

So I'll let you know when I've reached The Next Level, but for now I'm happy on this one.

Thursday, August 7, 2008

Procrastination, the brain, and celebrity fluff

So it's down to the wire in my time spent working in Mozambique, and all I can do is watch bad romantic comedies and compulsively update my useless celebrity expertise on perezhilton.com. What I should be doing, and what I can press myself to do for vast, uh, minutes on end, is analyzing the 9 datasets that make up the material of the triangulation project. But it seems that my brain has become overwhelmed. With each passing day spent staring at the computer screen, my fingers are getting clumsier, my mind slower, and my capacity for concentration shorter.

I put a romantic comedy on as I fell asleep last night, because my brain's craving for them is like a late-night ice cream craving. There was a moment when I drifted off to sleep and was only conscious of a stream of numbers.... 40.0, 11.1, 12.5 -- of the type I'd been endlessly keying into an excel spreadsheet earlier that day. The number streams seem to be causing stress on my neuronal connections, causing these poor cells to beg for Jennifer Aniston and her sister's wedding. I've even started watching the second-rate American shows that a Brazilian channel here broadcasts; shows I had never heard of and would never watch in the States, but which make it here maybe because of low syndication fees, because they give my mind the idiocy fix it needs.

I've never had such severe concentration problems, but then again I've never required such heavy, numbers-oriented concentration before. Another problem may be that I'm on my own with the work here, and I'm never sure if what I'm doing is productive or even correct. So there's probably some fear of failure mixed in with the cognitive overload, conspiring to put my mental output at about zero. I don't know whether to push on or give in and raid my roommate's DVD collection.