When the red sun sets...in Ambalapattu

fresh coffee after a day in the field
one of the community health worker's coffee shops
some peace
hand washing stations at the school
the school
government water tank
girls getting water out of one of the taps
rice fields on the way to Ambalapattu
the autos lined up to take us out for Dessas birthday dinner
sometimes elephants walk down the side of the road

A few busy days have passed by...

Wednesday we were trained in Basic Life Skills--CPR & AED. Brought me back to my life guarding days...even though the training has since changed a bit. Now I'll be fully up-to-date and qualified to keep your heart beating in the case of an emergency. Or something like that.

Yeah, so yesterday the GI team headed back to Ambalapattu to try out some geo-mapping. The idea is to take pictures of the government water tanks with our iPhones (there's an app for that! for real) and then take pictures of all of the taps the tank feeds. The phone then stores the coordinates of their locations, and we can produce a map of the system. We can also add other relevant sites--schools, homes, open defecation sites, toilet sites, etc.

Then we can test the water at various points and see if/where it is dirty. We know the government tanks are cleaned and chlorinated, but it seems that the water people are drinking is not clean. So where does it get dirty? By the open defecation sites? At a certain point under the road where there's a crack? Luckily our fancy technology can help us figure this out.

Once we have that information, we can figure out where the intervention should be focused. Like should we put filters on the taps disbursing dirty water? Or try to move the open defecation sites? Or is water clean at the taps, indicating that it gets dirty after it's stored in the home? This might indicated that safe storage and hygiene campaigns would be the most important area of focus...

We also had the chance to do a few more home visits, check out a school and the library. Some cool things:

-all the kids in the k-8 program receive hygiene training, like brushing your teeth, hand washing, etc

-people generally feel safe with the tap water because it looks and tastes clean

-people do boil their water before giving it to people who are sick, though

-doesn't seem like people are using the government maintained public toilets (I don't blame them)

-people are aware of ORS treatment for diarrhea, but not everyone uses it

So chatting with people and being so incredibly welcomed has been really awesome. I do wonder about the social desirability bias, though. I mean, people are on to us-- we ask about if and when their kids get sick, where the family gets water, how the use it, how the store it, if they clean it...So it may be the case people are telling us what they think we want to hear-- our kids don't get sick because we keep our water clean. Which could be totally true, but I'm wondering other ways to have these conversations so that we aren't quite so obvious. When it comes down to it, my favorite conversations at the home visits have been the ones about politics and food, anyways. And, somehow, we've learned just as much from those (that's relevant to our project, too!) less structured talks...

We ended the day nicely with some fresh coffee at a shop owned by one of the community health workers. And yes, I drank the coffee. Didn't want to be rude after all of the wonderful hospitality. Luckily it had so much milk and sugar I couldn't really taste the actual coffee. Even more exciting, the shop sold pineapples! I don't know if I've mentioned this--I've been eating at least 2 pineapples a day so far. No joke. They're small here...if that is any excuse. They are just so fresh and sweet. Amazing. And watching the sunset over the rice fields on the road back to Thanjavur isn't so bad either.

Oh, and the last thing, some monkeys gave me some funky looks on my way back from the track today.

One more last thing, we rode the bus with our house mom and house brother the other night. It was awesome. Public transportation is just so great and interesting around the world. Our house mom counted us like little ducklings as we hopped off. Me as the bus started pulling away. Probably wouldn't fly on the 147 down Michigan Ave...