Week Five - Another one bites the dust.

I can't believe that I am entering my sixth week here in Costa Rica ... time really flies! Week five was incredibly busy. More busy than I ever thought possible. We will be living with indigenous people this week and will only be able to have three lectures the whole week ... so my professors graciously made up for it this past week by over-loading us with lectures, homework, presentations, and projects galore! We have literally been in class or in the field everyday this week from 8am til around 9pm. So I am pretty exhausted. But really excited about global health! Some of the lectures this week were absolutely thrilling - Chagas', diarrheas, Leishmania, and all sorts of other exciting diseases! We also had 8 more hours of Spanish classes, which focused on medical terminology and conducting medical interviews in Spanish.

September 15th is Independence Day in Costa Rica (and all of Central America), so we were able to celebrate Independence Day in San Vito on Wednesday. We went into town for the Independence Eve celebration in the streets, as well as the Independence Day parade on the 15th. It was really awesome to celebrate Costa Rican independence with the ticos, which is markedly different from our celebrations on the fourth of July in the US. Here are a couple of pictures from the parade and celebrations:

The parade was a ton of fun although I got the worst sunburn of my life on my legs ... oops (see above). Oh well, pura vida!

In a couple of hours, we will be rolling out of the Las Cruces research station for the best week ever ... we will be living with the Boruca indigenous people until Wednesday, and then the Ngobe indigenous people from Wednesday until Friday. The Boruca people will give us demonstrations and lessons about their culture, traditions, and even show us how they dye their cloth. We will work extensively with them to collect samples from the rainforest to study when we get back to the research station. Once we are with the Ngobe people, we will be setting up a primary health care clinic for the indigenous people (one of my professors is an MD), who do not have easy access to health care facilities in their remote village. We will be triaging the patients, assisting with paperwork, and shadowing the MD in his assessment of the patients.

So I am REALLY excited about this week. It should be epic. I will take tons of awesome pictures and update y'all as soon as I am back on Saturday! :)