Wednesday July 6th

Day 5 of data collection. We are hoping to get all the houses done by this weekend but it seems like Belize has another idea. Today we walked out determined to get a lot done. By 9am we had located Tita and Alicia, however Tita was busy because she had been called by the City to locate a woman who lived in San Martin. As she left Alicia, Suzie and myself I wondered if I would get different responses from individuals I would be interviewing. As we started we divided the street and I went to some houses that I was going to visit a second time. After visiting them and finding no one I started on the street we had split up. My first house was a Spanish-speaking house. No interview. My second house was Spanish. By then I was starting to wonder if I would get any houses completed. Half way through it become sweltering hot and I started to sweat like crazy. I decided to stop by a stream/gutter and the amount of snails I saw was astounding. I wonder if there are high rates of schistosomiasis here? It would be interesting to see what other parasites exist in the water and what kids and people here are carrying. My third house luckily was an English speaker but she was in the middle of work so I agreed to come back later. After walking a while I located Alicia and Suzie and we decided that we needed to have all the Spanish households identified so those houses would be interviewed earlier just in case Tita or Alicia could not come out with us on some days. We then interviewed the Spanish speaking houses and our first household consisted of 15 people. The grandmother of the household admitted to having to give up one of her daughters for adoption because she could not afford to take care of all her children. The daughter she had given up for adoption was also helping to translate our study questions and I wondered how she felt about being given up? After finishing two more houses it was lunchtime and we departed ways and I went ahead and interviewed the other two English speaking houses, as I started on my last house the sky grayed and it began to rain heavily, the lady I was interviewing invited me into her house and we sat around the dinning room table as I interviewed her. At the end since the rain had not let up yet she asked me questions about myself and the project which I freely shared with her. She also told me about her family and was glad that we have taken time out of our summers so do this work which she also believes is necessary and vital. Once the rain stopped I bid the family goodbye and headed out in search of Suzie and Roberta. In the evening Roberta confirmed with Tita and Alicia about their availability and if they would be able to help in case we run over into next week? We may not have them starting next week. As we started up again t began to rain and thunder which stopped our work leaving us to only accomplish 7 houses today.