Cincinnati!

I'm cheating. I'm no longer in Cincinnati, but in Atlanta after missing our connecting flight to San Pedro Sula this morning. Had everything run more smoothly, I would now be somewhere on a bumpy dirt road halfway to Intibucá, packed into a 4WD truck with my luggage. Instead, Delta put us up in Comfort Inn for the night, and we head out for round 2 tomorrow morning. Hopefully this time we'll actually make it to Honduras.

Alright backtracking. So the past three days have been really great. I have learned so much already, and feel inspired (sorry for the excess cheese lately) by all of the people I have met so far. Everyone is super quirky, has strong views concerning Shoulder to Shoulder, and is absolutely adorable in his/her enthusiasm and excitement. I am already "falling in love" (I know, I shouldn't say that so much) with the people I've met so far, and I love listening to them tell stories.

Meanwhile, the more I learn about StoS and my project, I feel like there's even more to learn. My understanding so far is that the first leg of my time will be spent on data collection and record-keeping, mostly cross-checking and confirming vaccination coverage thus far. At first I was less than thrilled about this idea, mostly because I'm not a fan of data input and analysis, but it will be more people-work than computer-work, so I'm a lot more excited now. I will probably be teaming up with nutrition and health promoters, as well as brigade members of med students and nurses, so there are a lot of opportunities for me to learn and shadow different health practitioners and get a better grasp of how community medicine works in rural Honduras. Depending on how that goes, the idea is that we can use that information to target certain areas/communities where kids aren't getting their vaccinations. Fingers crossed, hopefully I'll be able to make some progress when I get down there.

Anyway, besides all the hustle and bustle of my StoS orientation, it was also SO great to see Rayray! I know y'all (read: Chris Riederer) are jealous. We spent some quality time in his dad's car, driving all over west Cincy at odd hours in the morning. Definitely need to wrangle my sleep schedule into shape... Anyway, we also saw Step Up in 3D!! Finally :)

In case anyone was wondering, it's as bad as it looks.