Jubilee.

1 exam down, 1 essay almost finished, 1 exam to go, tomorrow morning. In the midst of it all, this wonderful thing called The Queen's Jubilee Weekend is happening, where everyone feigns joy about the country being ruled by the same little old lady for 60 years. Really, any English person will freely admit they're just happy about having a 4-day weekend. Anyway, it happened to also be a friend, Rosie's, birthday, and living just up the street on a cul-de-sac, she had a jubilee birthday block party with a bake-off and voting for the most impressive cake. My amazingly talented flatmate Sarah created the masterpiece below. 

This cake, however, gave it a run for its money:

I literally laid in bed last night and instead of visions of vaccination programmes and outbreak controls dancing through my head, I tried to figure out how on EARTH they got the inside of the cake to look like that. I am still stumped.

Back to making flowcharts, disease categories, and transmission chains. 

5 days till departure!

The Beginning of the End.

Greetings from my current universe! Sorry for the lapse in writing, but hopefully one massive post will make up for it. Crunch time here.. classes are done, essays are in progress, exams start tomorrow. I feel like I have been sitting in this stupid chair for 2039490820935 hours. Probably not an unrealistic estimate. Life has been alright. Last week it got up to 80 degrees (f) every single day. Yes, in England. It was amazing. Because no one here has a backyard bigger than 9 square feet, every single person goes to the park when the weather's nice, so it feels like there's a big festival on whenever you walk through it.... on the way to the computer lab... to spend a sunny afternoon writing a paper.

The last 2 weeks have been class-free, but of course the amount of studying one hopes to achieve with said 'free' time is never actually what one accomplishes. Our research proposals for summer placements had to be submitted, and involved the extremely complex process of applying for 'ethical approval' from the university. This means ensuring that the data from your research is kept secure at all times, that you have a detailed research project information form for every participant, and collect a signed participant consent for every respondent in your study. So many times I wanted to call up the head of the department and say, "you DO realize we're doing this project AFRICA, right???" 

In the midst of this, I found out my dissertation supervisor is pregnant and will be on maternity leave in August -- the month I will be analyzing data and writing up my actual dissertation.Yet another unforeseen setback that really felt like the final straw in a year of setbacks. My main frustration with the UK system has been the inconsistency in professors: one will tutor you on a paper, another will mark it, and yet another will explain your mark to you. And each professor has extremely different criteria with which they mark/give feedback for an essay/exam. So I was relieved and excited to just have ONE supervisor to work with on ONE project for the rest of the year. Not so much. Having said that, I met my 'replacement' supervisor on Wednesday and she is really lovely. She is older and experienced and seems relaxed, and has done a lot of work on gender studies. (She actually teaches the module "Gender and Health" that I'd planned to take this year before it was withdrawn as an option.)

Mostly, I'm just so ready to go back to Africa. This happens in 10 days. The amount of work that needs to happen between now and then is mind boggling. Prayers for stamina and clarity would be very appreciated. 

Specifically tomorrow morning: I have one enormous exam in Epidemiology, worth 100% of my mark. Epidemiology is basically the mathematical study of how diseases spread, and involves memorizing numerous formulas for calculating odds, risk, incidence, and prevalence ratios, standardized mortality rates, screening sensitivity and positive predictive values, etc etc etc.Those of you who know me well understand that this is how I feel about anything math-related. So, this exam is petrifying and I would really love prayers for smooth going tomorrow. Back to studying. I leave you with photos. 

Love to you all!

Evening sky out my window to the left..

..and the right. 

Before all the tropical weather last week, it rained and rained and rained.
But if it must rain, this is what I most like to see out my window. 

Vancouver band Said the Whale came and played a free show in Sheffield!
It was great. I'm not sure Sheffield appreciated them as much as I did...
their 1st day in the UK, they apparently had $1500 stolen from their van. Welcome to England!
This is my favourite song of theirs. Good motivational studying music.

Last day volunteering at the Northern Refugee Centre's women's club,
working with some of the most amazing and resilient women I've ever met.
Represented: Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Libya,
Somalia, Eritrea, Mexico, Bangladesh, Russia, England, U.S..

This is Rita, from Tanzania, who wanted an 'exclusive'  picture with me.
Each woman has such a crazy story of how she ended up in Sheffield. 

Last weekend, my friend Catherine and I took a morning study break and ventured out to the Peak District to find  Ladybower Reservoir. This is it!

This a drain for when the reservoir gets too full.
Certainly the biggest drain I'VE ever seen.
(And yes, someone tried to throw a car tire in the drain. Logical.)

So much GREEN.
I'd kind of forgotten what trees and grass looked like up until this point.

A darling little van-turned-coffee-stop with a very posh espresso-making
system inside. I think it is what my Dad should do when he 'retires'... 

Sierra Leone Or Bust!

Here are two of the first image results when you Google 'Sierra Leone': 

I know, right? What a contrast: one of my favourite things in the world, and one of my least favourite. Well, I should clarify: love the kid, hate the gun. Not a big fan of national conflict or civil wars. But I am pretty interested in the way that conflict affects a country, especially in relation to it's general health and HIV/AIDS prevalence. So when we had to give our top choices for places to carry out dissertation research this summer, I said Democratic Republic of Congo, or Sudan. My professor quickly said no, and no. The university will not be liable for transporting your corpse back to the U.S. A week later a classmate and I got a call to come to her office. When we sat down with her, she explained that one of the organizations neither of us had been particularly interested in had just decided to offer 2 placements in Sierra Leone, were we interested? 

Six months later, I have a completed research proposal and tickets to fly to Sierra Leone in 28 days. Coordinating things with the organization (called Restless Development) has been a bit of a challenge at times, but I think things will go well once we are on the ground and working face to face with them. (They are a 'youth-led development agency', which may explain why it's been slightly hit and miss communicating with them..) My classmate, Barrett, is an International Development major and will be looking at civic participation and the reintegration of child soldiers into society. I'll be looking at youth sexual and reproductive health and knowledge about HIV/AIDS. I am STOKED. This is one of those things I've always wanted to do -- walk into a community and sit down with a bunch of young men and women and ask them what they think about abstinence, condoms, abortion, STIs, faithfulness, relationships -- but of course you can't do that... unless it's 'research'. So I get to wear the hallowed 'researcher' label and collect all sorts of opinions and thoughts and insight from these young people with so much wisdom about their culture and it's problems, and how to best go about solving those problems.

I'm also stoked to be in West Africa, since my travels thus far have only been in the South and East. Also, the dominant language in Sierra Leone is Creole, which is fantastic because it has a lot of French influence (et je sais un peu du Francais), and it's also spoken in Haiti, where I'd really love to work someday. Also, as you will see if you Google 'Freetown', the capital city where we're based, it is surrounded on 3 sides by BEACH. Really beautiful beach, too.

So that is what's happening. Summer in Sierra Leone: 11 June - 27 July. And no, there is not a war going on there, it ended 10 years ago. And Ben tells me it is one of the countries in Africa you are least likely to be kidnapped in. So there we go!

Thank God It's Friday Night.

Happy Weekend, Everyone! Thanks to some sort of bank holiday on Monday (still not quite sure what we were celebrating), all my classes for the week were today. I was in the same classroom from 9 to 5 for back-to-back lectures. Thank goodness that's over with. Things are going alright. We are starting to work on final assignments and exam preparations, which is terrifying and exciting at the same time. Amidst all the work, this week I went to my first Ceilidh (okay Isaac and Leah, you can stop cheering now), which for those who don't know is like Scottish square dancing. A very sweet older doctor in my programme helped organize it as a fund-raiser for building a school in a village we visited in Kenya. He's also in the band that played that night, aptly named 'No Mean Feet'. Cleverrrrrr...   

I also went to small group at my friend Sarah's house. The last time we met there, I noticed that her neighbours had a rather oddly shaped bush around their house. Thanks to DST, this week it was actually light enough to see it properly, and it is indeed a bush in the shape of a caterpillar. I could hardly contain myself. I took a picture for you all to witness the wonder. 

The weather has been completely erratic lately. During one lecture today, it rained and shined and rained and shine probably 6 times. Every time the sun's out, all these news stories pop up about how England's going through a drought because it's had so little rain this year, and every time it starts to rain, all these claims that we're in for a national flood warning crop up. I'm so confused. In spite of all this, things are green and the sky has been nice lately.  

 Miss you all. Will write more soon. 

Jiggety Jig.

I'm baaaaaaack. For those not aware, I made a glorious trip home for the month of April (Easter break). Opted not to post about it so I could surprise a few people, which was marvelously successful. Home was filled with lovely things: Easter brunch with all the cousins, Maren's final recital, Mum's birthday, long trail runs in the woods, house and dog sitting for a week, sunshine, a surprise birthday party at the beach for the boyf, Seattle, Olympia, Vancouver, bagels, Mexican food, big fat thrift stores, card games with all 3 grandparents, consecutive hours with dear friends, and studying when necessary at old coffee shops around town. To say leaving was hard is an understatement. I thought it might get easier over time.. it doesn't. Especially when it's sunny in Bellingham and pouring rain in Sheffield; when I have nothing here to greet me but police sirens and piles and piles of work to finish by the end of the month. My life is so different there than here. And to everyone who said "Oh, your programme's only a year?! That'll FLY by!".. that's not actually true. And, and, and.

Instead of more whining, which I want to do, I've been trying to be mature about this, which I don't want to do. I think that after years of traveling all over and coming back to Bellingham thinking "well, I guess this place is alright", I finally get it. I finally see that Bellingham is a ridiculously wonderful place. I get it why people like my parents move halfway across the country to live there, or why people stick around years after finishing at WWU. It's not just filled with people I love, it has seas to swim in, lakes to kayak around, mountains to climb up and down, trails to run on, or you can just sit and LOOK at it, because it's beautiful (see above). Maybe it took living in Sheffield to figure that out. The irony of this is that in 4 months, I'll finally have a Masters degree that puts me anywhere on the globe... and I really miss Bellingham. I still want to go work in the Congo and Sudan, but I could also be pretty happy with a job that lets me work at home or close to it most of the time.

The other thing I've noticed in my pursuit of maturity is that for every bad, there's usually a good. Cases in point:
1. Bad: I had to leave on Saturday. Good: SeaTac airport was completely dead when Ben and I got to there. Check-in took 2 minutes and we got to spend almost an hour playing Dutch Blitz in the waiting area.
2. Bad: My plane had to circle Heathrow 5 times before landing because of rain, fog, and wind. When we finally did land it kind of sounded like the plane cracked in half. Good: When everyone opened their eyes and pried their white knuckles off the seat in front of them, we realized we were all still alive and in one piece. It never ceases to amaze me that millions people routinely FLY, in an enormous contraption miles in the AIR, hours and HOURS across land and sea, and reach their destinations [relatively] unscathed.
3. Bad: Realized halfway through the flight that I forgot my toothbrush at home. Good: In all my travels I've never flown an airline that offered free toothbrushes and toothpaste. But guess who does? British Airways' Seattle to London flight.
4. Bad: I had a group meeting at 7am this morning, a group presentation at 10am, and class until 3pm. With 2 hours of sleep. Good: I'm alive. The rest of the week looks more manageable with slightly more sleep in the cards.

Miss you all.