how did my life get like this?!?!

I survived 2nd term

Do I get a medal or something?

my fellow students

I popped over to Dar es Salaam to meet my professor/advisor, in from the states, as well as the other students from my cohort who are here in the country on internships. It was so fun to see them, since I had said goodbye to them all in December, not knowing if I'd ever see some of them again. (Though the international public health world is pretty small, so I'll likely run into them in one capacity or another in the future.)



They are, from left to right, Sarah, Ashley, Chase (also living in Zanzibar), Peter (my professor), and Aliya.

moving and packing and traveling

Things are downright crazy here. I have traveled back and forth between New Haven and Baltimore three times in the past 5 days. Even Justin traveled down to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia (an hour away from Baltimore) at the exact time I was traveling north. We passed each other in New York. Both of Juma's parents were out of town at the same time. We had a friend pick him up from school and put him to bed--sleepover on a school night!

I was in Baltimore on Monday to take two finals, then hurried back on an overnight train so I can help Justin finish packing up the house. Tomorrow we load up the moving van and drive down to Baltimore. So our time in New Haven is down to hours now.

On Thursday and Friday we pack up my apartment in Baltimore, move everything into storage, and run our final errands. Friday night, we fly to Tanzania via London. We will arrive in Tanzania early Sunday morning, then take a little flight over to Zanzibar.

We are going to miss New Haven. Juma is very sad about leaving his friends "forever," and we are going to miss our friends, too. I even made friends in Baltimore, the other first years in my division. Yesterday, they held a goodbye lunch for me.

pomp and circumstance

Mine's on the left: white for Master of Arts and salmon color for Master of Public Health

Justin's is on the right: blue for Master of Philosophy

it's done

I just sent my thesis off to my professors. WOOT!

goings-on

I'm taking a little time off my school duties to let you know what's been going on at the Beckham house.

Juma finally lost his first two teeth. Unfortunately, they had to be pulled out by the dentist because one of his big teeth was coming in behind. Fortunately, the tooth fairy pays extra for that.

Juma finished up his first season of basketball; the best part was the trophy. Of course.

He touched the ball during games. Twice!



Next sport: baseball. Justin is assistant coach, and Juma has three friends on the team.


We drove down to Baltimore last week to check out the city and Johns Hopkins University. On Friday Justin and Juma had a great time exploring the town while I was visiting with professors and other prospective students. On Saturday we all went to a children's science museum, where we extracted some wheat germ DNA (Seriously! They have an experiment set up for small kids to do this), lay on a bed of nails, took mini-lie detector tests (Juma's a terrible liar, but Justin and I...), and tried on a space suit. On Sunday I let JHU know I'd be coming next fall.




Connecticut's weather has showed us it's spring: volatile and usually wet. But at least the flowers are peeking through.

thesis

excuse my silence while I write my thesis...

busy

busy, busy, busy.

The last two days, I haven't been home from morning to evening. So here's a picture to tide you over until I can really write.

school

By the way, both Juma and I started school last week, so we've been busy. (Justin is very busy applying for jobs and getting the house unpacked and in order.)

Juma is thoroughly enjoying first grade (yes, first grade already!) and has kids in his class he already knew from before, so that helped a lot. We got him into the school we wanted him in (it's not just a matter of going to the local neighborhood school here), and it's within walking/biking distance, so we've been getting lots of exercise.

As for me, I write my first paper tomorrow, and am trying to find time to learn Arabic, read two scholarly books a week, write the occasional paper, work on my thesis, and still be a good mommy and wife. And not go insane through all of that. So far, so good. But it hasn't even been a week yet.

10-year reunion

This last weekend, when I was in Laughlin, my high school class had their 10-year reunion. The old student body president called my mom looking for an update on me, and I guess she lied ;), because he was impressed about what I've been doing the past 10 years. He asked me to write up a little blurb for them to read about me. This is the blurb they read (I'm assuming they read it):

......

Sarah Wilson Beckham, MVHS 1997

You may remember Sarah Wilson, now Sarah Beckham, as That One Girl on the Drumline, or as One of Those Kids Who Took Too Many AP Classes. Or perhaps you remember her as One of Those Rare Girls Who Managed to Hang out with Kartson Carr Without Drooling Over Him. What you probably do not remember about Sarah is that she always had a passion for Africa. Ever since she was too young to remember, she wanted to trek to Africa and learn Swahili.

As a junior in college, her opportunity finally came to go to Tanzania, on the East African coast, with a study abroad program. Armed with two semesters of Swahili language courses and some anthropology, she arrived on the tropical island of Zanzibar, 30 miles off the coast of Tanzania. She was majoring in International Development, and hoped to study how village women made money in the informal economy. But fate had a different path for Sarah. Two weeks after arrival, she found herself sick with body aches, fatigue, and a high fever. She had malaria. Her husband of only five weeks, Justin, took her to a Russian-trained Zanzibari doctor, who treated her with some drugs. The drugs did not cure her malaria, though, and she tried treatment after treatment. Finally, after five weeks, five rounds of drugs, a dozen malaria tests, two nights in a hospital, four different medical clinics, and some crazy drug-induced dreams, Sarah overcame the resistant strain of the parasite.

Instead of doing the sensible thing of just flying home, Sarah stayed in Zanzibar. Inspired by her harrowing experience with malaria and the local health care system, Sarah decided to focus her attention on public health issues in Africa. The rest of that semester in Tanzania, she studied peoples’ experiences with malaria, a preventable and treatable disease that kills at least one million children every year worldwide. Sarah went back to Tanzania again two years later, in 2001, this time leading a group of college students. Three years later, in 2004, she returned once again, bringing her two-year old son along (he got malaria, but Sarah knew how to treat it properly this time).

In 2005, Sarah began a graduate school program at Yale in public health and African Studies. For her summer internship in 2006, she returned to Tanzania to study maternal anemia in a high-poverty area where 50% of infant deaths are related to anemia. She is currently drafting a paper for publication that gives recommendations on how to improve the situation there. This fall, she will once again travel to Tanzania with her husband and now five-year old son, to do research on how poverty, illiteracy, and local culture affect access to medicine for people living with HIV/AIDS. She will graduate with a joint master’s degree in 2009, and hopes to work to improve public health interventions by making them better fit the local political, social, and economic context.

She has never gotten malaria again.

done!

I just sent in my last final! Woohoo!

finals

It's the time of the semester again: finals week. I just turned in two papers, one on depression, and one on needle-exchange in Connecticut. The needle-exchange one was a semester-long group project involving interviews, and all sorts of local politics that I would have rather not had to have dealt with. But that's how public health practice goes, I suppose. It's a big relief to have those two papers in (one of them was 56 pages). But instead of being less stressed, I just am thinking about the other project, statistical analysis, and two essays I have to still turn in. Oy.

It will be over soon. Except that as soon as it's over, I fly to Amsterdam. Then as soon as I get back from there, I have to start packing up our apartment. More oy.

I'm looking forward to a relaxing summer.

mo' news

And I just found out today that a paper I co-authored, the anemia paper based on research we did last summer in Pemba, got accepted to a conference in Amsterdam! So I should be headed to Amsterdam for a quick trip in May. More woohoo!

Man, this has been a good week.

more money

And I just heard today that I got a not-so-small fellowship for my research in Africa. Woohoo!

money

I just found out today I got a small fellowship to help pay for our next trip to Africa! Woohoo!

busy

I took on too much this semester, and I'll really feeling the crunch. I want to keep up the blog, but can't find much time. I think it'd be a good idea to just put pictures up, but we haven't taken any new pictures. Sheesh.

Here's some of the stuff I'm trying to do:

-get outside comments on and rewrite paper on last summer's research on maternal anemia, with an eye toward publication

-design, get ethical review board permission for (got it today!), and conduct a small study on the effects of changing policies on syringe-exchange in Connecticut

-write a concept sheet (with an eye toward writing and publishing a paper) on health-care utilization, based on a large HIV prevention research study being conducted in India

-work

-keep the house in somewhat decent order

-cook, eat, and clean up

-write a midterm taking survey data, cleaning it up, coding, analyzing, and interpreting it

-write a midterm on the epidemiological associations between religiosity/spirituality and health

-design an (fake) intervention for HIV-positive Jamaican youth to get them to take their meds

-read a Swahili-language novel about prisoners who were jailed (without reason, charge, or trial) after the assassination of the first president of Zanzibar

-pay attention to Juma

-pay attention to Justin

-not go insane

finished!

I finished my finals. I just have to drop off a copy of my last paper on campus.

Of course, I have several academic projects I need to work on now, because I never had time for them during the semester.

It never ends.

phaa-shew: thoughts on finals

Feel free to skip this is you don't give a dang about Sarah's academic career. Here's the short version: I'm in the middle of finals.

I just finished the academic's version of a marathon: I wrote a twenty-page research paper (okay, it was 19 1/2) in 5 hours. My brain is hurting. My body is worn out, and I'm a little shaky. (But that probably has more to do with the fact that I ate a string cheese for lunch, and breakfast? Hmmm. Can't connect the memory cells, which probably means I didn't have any. Oh, wait, an English muffin. Phew. Now the public health side of me doesn't have to feel too guilty.)

I wouldn't recommend the marathon paper-writing, or the string-cheese-for-lunch, for that matter. But, hey, I was just sitting down to write after 3 straight hours of organizing notes. I also wouldn't recommend waiting to decide on a research paper topic until exactly one week before it's due, and that only because you have to give a presentation on your topic the next day.

So I read-read-read half the weekend (every second except for the seconds I was hanging out with Juma), took notes-notes-notes, and then wrote-wrote-wrote. Leaving myself five hours was stupid, but that's what it came down to, so that's what I had to work with.

But for their part, it wasn't fair to the professors to make the final paper due the first day of reading week, two days after the last class got over, just so they can travel during reading week and finals week. But that's the privilege of a professor, isn't it? Deciding due dates. Oh, the power!

Aside from the hurried writing schedule, this paper was actually good for me to write. This class it's for is about the disciplines that study Africa. What does Africa mean to the discipline, and what does the discipline mean to Africa. Okay, a little abstract. But it got me thinking a lot about a problem that has been plaguing me every since I got over my fourth bout with malaria back in 1999. That fateful month that launched me on my career path.

Those little parasites got me interested in public health and anthropology, and, specifically, using both of them to improve the lives of people. But the two disciplines have a rather awkward relationship, one being quantitative and self-assured in its "objectivity," the other being qualitative and denying the existence of "objectivity" except as a construct people find useful to think with. The illegitimate child of the two disciplines is applied medical anthropology, a discipline trying to cater to both parent disciplines as well as international donors and the people it's trying to help. So it's kind of split and confused, trying to prove itself, being accused of "selling out," and who knows if it's actually doing any good.

That's what I wrote about. And I didn't get a chance to even read through the whole thing, so I hope it's coherent and not riddled with typos (thank goodness for spell check). The best part is I sent the email at exactly 4:59pm, one minute before it was due. How cool is that?

a day at home

Juma's been having a fever now and then over the past few days, but it's been pretty low and hasn't interfered with him playing or going to school. But this morning he woke up with a temperature of 102 degrees, so we kept him home. He's been on antibiotics since Sunday night, because he's had a cough that isn't clearing up.

Luckily since we're students our schedules are flexible enough to switch off taking care of him. Justin's off to class this morning, so I'm home; this afternoon I've got class, so Justin'll be home. But that does mean we have to miss out on some homework time. I've got a short presentation to give at 1:30, and I didn't even pick a topic until yesterday. I have to then turn that short presentation into a 20-page paper by Monday. While still attending the rest of my classes, taking care of a sick kid (he'll have to stay home until he's fever-free for 24 hours), attending meetings, working, yadda yadda.

At least this is the last week of classes. Next week is reading week, and I have 6 papers due between Monday and Friday. The next week is finals week, but at least I'll be done before then. That's especially important since Juma's school is closed during finals week.