Friday, June 6, 2008

Homeward Bound

The last two weeks have been quite the whirlwind for me here in Savar. A very big and unexpected blow came with the news of Gib's passing away. I'm very thankful for my friends here, who were endlessly supportive. However, being so far away from home and family turned out to be more difficult than anticipated, so I--after a lot of deliberation--decided to go back to Vermont during my upcoming vacation. I'll be heading out of Dhaka on June 28th, and returning on July 11th. I'm planning on a quiet few days at home to recharge. (I'll probably also end up using that time to eat as much cheese as humanly possible.)


School has been going well, despite recent ups and downs. The course in Health Economics and Financing was really very interesting. We had two excellent professors come to teach that unit; a few years ago both were at LSHTM, but now one is at Hopkins and the other is working for the WHO. Earlier this week we started our final course before the vacation--Environment, Health, & Climate Change. Off to a bit of a slow start so far, but on Thursday we have a field visit planned to see some arsenic mitigation programs in action, so I'm quite excited about that. Hopefully it will prove fruitful--more about that on the weekend.


Lastly, I'll end with a video clip that our economics instructor showed us. It's from a website called Gapminder, and it's a short (and fairly dynamic) discussion about the population growth in Bangladesh. I wanted to embed the video here, but my internet connection is being rather painfully slow, so for now I'll just refer you to the link for "GapCast 5". If you have a couple minutes, I encourage you to take a look...

1 comment:

Anne said...

Now you will just have to convince the pilot to make a stop in Los Angeles on your flight home. I trust it will not be a problem.