Every morning I take Doxycycline religiously but within 10 minutes I’m sick :( . After forcing myself to eat the oatmeal and some PBJ crackers I felt slightly better but not at my prime. It took me a considerably longer time to prepare myself for the day. We walked to UB, which is less than 5 minutes from our house and continued to work on the survey tool. Today we decided to divide the work and determine who will be responsible for the different parts of the survey process. We agreed that we would have 1UB and 1USF student pair up and go into the community while administering the survey at different households. This facilitates the partnership aspect between both universities so that we could both learn from each other about Belize and how to conduct epidemiologic studies.
We went through all the surveys we brought and choose questions that we were interested in. This process was very hard because we found alot of really great questions that would answer what we wanted but many questions could not be asked because they were culturally insensitive to Belizean culture so there was alot of tweaking. Also we did not want questions that did not help in answering our questions and we also did not want to have too many questions because our aim was to keep the time in each household to a minimum (they are doing us a service by allowing us to come into their households and answering questions) . Dr. Westhoff also pointed out the importance of uniformity in the entire process.
After spending 4-5 hours combing through each question and its importance we were able to had a grand total of 68 questions. We also discussed the importance of uniformity and the essential role a pilot test would play in helping us understand how our survey tool worked or did not work and whether some questions were confusing or unnecessary. We also have to be very careful that we do not appear like we are going to be the “savior” of the community, we are not here to uncover issues, we want to see what needs we can address through education etc.
In the afternoon before lunch, we walked into San Martin with our “cultural broker” Alicia and a Nursing student (Ruth) from UB to discover the location of an upcoming health fair that will be held in Parka san Americas and will be sponsored by Pro-Belize. We hope that we can partner with this organization and others such as Red Cross of Belize, Ministry of Health, Dandriga cancer center, diabetes association, NEMO, Lomaloss dialysis etc.
One issue I think we will encounter is mapping the community because there are no house numbers and some lots have more than one house within them. We still have this issue to work through but hopefully it does not pose a huge issue in achieving our end goal. The neighborhood is made of many homes and majority of the houses have corrugated roofs. A few of the homes have a Mayan traditional house in the surrounding compound, which has grass/hay as the roof. There are no paved roads and most are dirt roads. I have also not seen any community centers but we have passed a few churches. I hope to be able to walk through the community later this week and explore it further and also get an idea of the community set up which will help us tremendously.
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