Departing in the morning

I'm getting up in roughly four hours but am nowhere near tired. Been saying goodbyes for the past week which of course makes me sad because I just may be the biggest sap, a fact to which I'm sure you all can attest. I don't think I'm going straight to Santa Lucia tomorrow, most likely staying in a nearby town, but then off to my new home on Friday! If anyone wants to see where I'll be living, check out the Shoulder to Shoulder website online. I'll be living there, but not working for them exactly. The research I'm doing is run by the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center and funded by the NIH. I somehow got lucky enough to find a project that would let me work with them and set me up in Latin America, and the woman I'll be working for is amazing. To give a brief description of the project, we're trying to determine the viral etiologies of acute respiratory infections in rural Honduran population of children less than five years of age who present to local clinics with fever and respiratory symptoms. I'll recruit patients throughout the day, obtain consent, help them fill out questionnaires, and take naso-pharyngeal swabs to be frozen in a lab and later shipped to the US for analysis. I'm incredibly excited, but extremely nervous.

So I'll try and keep this blog neat and concise, but I'm sure it will run how I talk and think...all over the place and without much sense. However, I hope you all can enjoy the stories and pictures I share!

muchos besos