Due to poor internet access in Puerto Escondido ( and maybe a little bit of lazy beach bum attitude) this blog is a summary of the events. Photo posts will be added later!
It has been a whole week sense I have been here in this beautiful beach town! I am tanned, relaxed and having a great time. Although I still have classwork, this is a much needed vacation for me, as my studies at UCD have been uninterrupted (no summer or winter vacations since 2006!) The group is staying at Casamar, a condo style hotel place that is really nice and I am sharing a room with Jennifer and Yadira. The surf is nice here, as it should be, seeing as how Puerto Escondido is the surf capital of Mexico. There was a Vans surf competition for the past 5 days and I got to see a little of it, but mostly got to drink the cheap beers and enjoy the weird music they played. The nightlife here is super chill; most people stand around to drink at bars but I like to dance, so it's just not my scene. The beaches here are nice, so far my favorite is Playa Carrizalillo, which you need to go down a series of stairs to get to, but when you get to the bottom, you enter into a hidden little bay. It can be quite exhausting to get up and down from the beach, especially when you are carrying a surf board, but its a really cool beach. The surf here is calm, so its good for beginners (this is were I took a surf lesson) but I am getting bored here and want to get knocked down and tossed around by some bigger waves, so I am hoping to surf on bigger waves at Playa La Punta. I am in love with Squalo, a Mexican surf brand that has a really cute shop on the Zicatela, or the main beach strip of Puerto Escondido.
While I am not doing any clincal rotations, we did attend malaria, chagas and dengue brigades with a state agency responsible for mosquito abatement and vector borne disease management. It was really neat! We would hope into the back of pick up trucks, ride into the jungle and visit the families that were ill or at a high risk of acquring a vector borne illness. It was hot, sweaty, dirty, but I loved it! This is the mechanism of public health- going out into the marginalized communities and taking preventative and palliative measures to control transmissible diseases. Prevention is mostly involved by educating communities about the insects that carry the disease and how to decrease the opportunity for the insect to cause illness. Methods like mosquito netting, painting the house with a substance made of chalk to repel insects in the home, and cleaning the home to remove places where the insect can nest and live are the primary methods. I also just finished my first Paul Farmer book, Pathologies of Power, and am all fired about about international health and epidemiology. Although I want to pursue a career in medicine, I am finding that I get so fired up about epidemiology and the social/economic/political implications of health outcomes.
More to come...
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