Post-exam resolutions

It's 4:30 am and I'm sitting in the same chair I've been in since 10pm - empty coffee cup and ice cream bowl to my left. Stack of books and papers on my right. Laptop somewhere in between. Ce la vie Phd?

While these days of frantic proposal writing and little sleep are not quite the norm - my recent years of strenuous intellectual exercise haven't done much for my overall physical physique. I keep on resolving to find a way to get some exercise in Port-au-Prince that I actually enjoy enough to do repeatedly ...but I have been short on inspiration....until now.

Imagine my surprise when my 4:39 am weary-eyed browsing brought up this article about exercise options in my Haitian hometown!

Rural Hipsters

I really enjoyed this NY Times feature (story and slideshow) on my fellow young adults with (sub)urbanite roots who are joining the local foods movement and trading their iMacs for overalls (Actually, they are probably keeping their iMacs and just pulling their mid-90s-cool overalls out of the back of the closest. No trade-offs required.)

I'm sure that many of them have been inspired (as I was) by Michael Pollen's book "The Ominivore's Dilemna" and the wave of other local-foodie propaganda (in the good sense) that has hit the media in recent years. (The really cool ones were already reading Wendell Berry back in the last millennium)

If you haven't already, I encourage you to check out the Local Harvest site to learn how to find locally grown foods in your community - including farmers markets and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farms. "Buying a share" in a CSA will get your household a wonderful array of fresh local fruits and veggies all through your local growing season while ensuring that the small farmer has the financial capital needed to plant, harvest and provide for their own households.

If you need any ideas of what to do with so many wonderful new fruit and veggies, just ask me. I'm almost a "nutrition professional"....but better get back to my A-exam studying to make sure!

Making way for Mrs. Bush

The US's First Lady spent part of yesterday morning at the clinic where I work during her quick visit to Port-au-Prince (It appears she flew on to Mexico for the afternoon). Standing to the left of her in the AP photo is the Director General of the clinic Dr. Deschamps. Reuters posted several photos from the visit. You can actually catch a little glimpse of some of the staff and patients (and a lot of the first lady).

I seem to be making a habit of not being around when Laura visits my place of work. In 2005 she and her daughter Jenna visited one of World Relief's church partner sites in Rwanda. One of my friends is sitting next to her in the White House photo release.

I must confess I was kind of glad not to be there yesterday. The clinic gets quite a number of US Congress people as well as occasional high level directors of UN agencies, foundations, corporations, etc. coming through. They tend to come in waves. There was one week towards the end of last year where we didn't go a single day without a black Suburban full of security agents sitting with their engines (and air conditioning) running in the courtyard - ready to whisk their high profile charges away at a moment's notice.

High-level hospitality takes a lot of time and effort from the clinic's leadership and administrative staff. Work tends to come to an artificial sort of standstill as you have to be on call in just the right place at just the right time, looking busy, in case they tour past your work space. (Not that we aren't usually busy but you have to be extra busy looking at exactly the right moment). It's a little awkward to have to slip nervously past men in dark sunglasses toting guns to get to the photocopier - that is if you are allowed to walk around the place at all. I have no idea what the patients think about all of the fuss.

There are some definite advantages to putting our best face forward for such guests. In the days leading up to their arrival, walls are freshly painted and signs are posted on office doors - which are improvements we get to enjoy for the longer term. It's hard to say just how much financial and other support comes in direct response to such visits, but if giving a congressperson from rural Oklahoma a tour of the clinics means global AIDS funding will continue for the next 4 or maybe even 8 years, it is probably time well spent.

While were on the topic of the Bush family's diplomatic globetreking, check out this Time.com article written by Brit pop star turned celebrity activist Bob Geldof about this Africa tour with the US President. His take on GWB's mostly positive but largely unrecognized legacy in Africa is refreshing - particularly because he openly acknowledges that he doesn't support Mr. Bush's policies for US involvement elsewhere in the world.

Eating Earth

Continuing on the theme of food supply, here is a link to an AP article that came out in February about women and children in Port-au-Prince eating dirt to ward off hunger.

Several people emailed me the article when it first came out and I've been meaning to post it ever since. Just yesterday, I realized that I met the reporter who wrote the story at a party in P-au-P a few weeks ago - he's a relatively recent Northwestern grad and the only AP reporter for all Hispanola. Hopefully I'll run into him again when I return to Haiti so I can talk to him more about the research he did for the story.

Eating non-food substances (e.g. dirt, ice, uncooked starch) - a behavior technically called "pica" - is a well documented practice among children and pregnant women around the world. Here is a link to a 1967 Time Magazine article about African American women eating laundry starch during pregnancy. (Please note that article is less than culturally/politically correct in its terms and tone by today's standards)

My friend Sera conducts research in Pemba, one of the two islands that make up Zanzibar, about the association between pica and anemia in pregnant women. The question remains whether being anemic causes women to crave dirt (e.g. for the minerals) or whether something in the dirt is causing women to be anemic (e.g. through introduction of parasites) .

Last summer I brought Sera some samples of the Haitian mud cookies to send to a soil lab in Scotland - not sure what they found in them but now that it's big news from Haiti, I should ask!

Let them eat pasta?

What connects a farmer in North Dakota and a school girl in Lagos, Nigeria? It's not necessarily a $12.50 monthly donation to a child sponsorship organization. It's wheat - crossing continents as part of our globalized food system.

Check out this NY Times.com article and accompanying slideshow about the global wheat trade. Food prices have been increasing rapidly in recent months. While this is good news for North Dakotan farmers who need to send their children to college, it's not so good news for the Nigerian families who purchase bread made from imported US grains to feed their families.

The article makes the link between global trends towards changing dietary patterns- the "Westernization of diets" to include more wheat products such as bread and pasta - and the price changes. What the article doesn't make as explicit is the implication of these rising food prices for human health - especially child nutrition.

Rising food prices and changing dietary patterns have very real implications for the mothers and children we are working with in urban Port-au-Prince. Three of the most popular infant foods prepared by Haitian moms today are "bread soup", "spaghetti soup" and "cracker soup" all made with imported wheat products rather than the more "traditional" black bean sauce or manioc flour porridge.

As I work on my proposal, I am thinking about how to add an indicator of local food prices to my data collection to see if these global changes in food prices are affecting local prices and in turn the nutritional status of the babies in our clinic. Of course I will just be skimming the surface of this question - one of my friend's entire thesis is about food prices and child nutrition status in India.

UPDATE: The FAO and the World Bank have a good sites about rising global food prices. The graph on Wheat prices is from the WB.

The A B C s of earning a PhD

I arrived back in Ithaca this morning and was greeted by 50+ degree weather and the face of my good friend Sunny- definitely a positive start to my month back at Cornell! It's probably not going to be all sunshine and smiles in the weeks to come. I will spend the next 4 weeks preparing for and taking my "A exam" on Thursday, March 27.

The A exam is a major Cornell PhD milestone. In my department, the exam involves preparing an extensive research proposal and then "defending" the proposal during an oral examination led by my 4 thesis committee members. They can ask about any technical questions related to the proposal or the coursework I took during my first two years at Cornell. Theoretically, the A exam happens after after you finish course work and before you start your research. In my case I've already done some formative research down in Haiti to help understand the context I'm working and to get things organized for the intervention we will be starting in May.

A year or two down the road will come the B exam - the defense of my final completed dissertation.

And the C? The rest of my career!