3'rd week check-up

First off, I want to thank everyone for all the birthday wishes, ya’ll are the best! And I seriously had an awesome time, most Thai bday yet! Since my cousin was here all week, we carried on the celebrations long after I officially turned 25, so I def can’t complain.

Work has been going pretty well. It sort of varies dramatically from having a ton to do, to spending all my time gchatting and playing with the new office puppy. For reals, I am not a dog person, but this puppy is ador. Anyways, still working on the final write up reports, but I anticipate doing more “real” work this week, which I’m pumped about. Although apparently along with running on Thai time, Thai people like to keep things up in the air and change their plans all kinds, which is clearly super convenient. Like, work is taking me to another province, and first they said we would leave Monday, then Sunday, then Tuesday, and now it’s Wednesday; though I’m actually ok with that. The reason we are waiting is because there is apparently an NGO forum held in both Thai and English on the last Tuesday of every month here in Chiang Mai. Tomorrow’s forum is going to be related to the psychology of helping people cope with living with HIV, so I think that should be interesting. And then I guess on Wednesday we head to Lamphun province, which is just about an hour east of here. We are going to meet up with the OVC (Orphan and Vulnerable Children) team and help them in conducting their situation analysis. So for you non MPH’ers, a situation analysis is when you gather baseline data in order to tailor your project appropriately so you can best meet the needs of the communities/people you are helping. In our case, I can only assume we will be getting data on the general health of the target populations, how big of a problem HIV and HIV related discrimination is, what services are currently being offered and by whom, what the population knows about transmission, stuff like that. I’ll check back in next week after we’ve actually done it.

Other than that, I’ve just been hanging out with the roomies, getting to know Chiang Mai. I seriously do feel so lucky that we all get along so well and have such a good time together. On Saturday we decided to finally do some of the cultural/touristy things we had been meaning to do. We checked out some the more famous Wats in our city, and they were pretty awesome. One of my fave’s was made entirely of teak wood, and another one had these gorg giant paintings on the inside. All of them had a bunch of donation bowls with the names of the week by them. One of my Thai co-workers explained to me that for good luck, you are meant to give a donation to the one correlating to the day you were born. Yeah…he seemed pretty shocked I didn’t know…(it’s a Wed.) We also went to the “Lucky Fish Spa”, which was more disconcerting than I imagined it would be. Basically, you stick your feet in this big pool and these fish bite off the dead skin. Yeah, I thought it would tickle a little, but it was honestly just kinda whack and uncomfortable.

Ok, that’s about it for now. We get a fourth roomie in a few weeks. While I’m excited about fresh meat, I’m also clearly not looking forward to having to share the gigantic master bedroom, but oh well. I’ve had awesome luck in the past of becoming absolute besties with my randomly assigned roomies, so here’s to hoping for another Jenny!

Xoxo
Rae