Blogging- am I doing it wrong?

In the past three weeks, I have moved to Tena, started working out of the Concejo Cantonal de Niñez y Adolescencia office in Archidona, designed a survey questionnaire, tested it twice with a total of 6 families (our goal is 100-200 total), sat in a dozen different government offices, gone out to the nearby villages four times, visited a cheese factory and a private waterfall, interviewed a former mayor, learned how to do random cluster sampling, applied random cluster sampling to select 20 populations from the 120 listed communities in the canton of Archidona, looked at a map to try to find out where the hell those 20 communities are, asked myself “How on Earth are we going to get to half of those?”, gotten sunburned three times, gotten attacked by biting insects more times than I can count, fallen in love with avena, fallen in love with guayusa again, downloaded Epi Info to record and analyze our data, cried upon opening its 300-page tutorial, started learning how to use Epi Info, cursed Epi Info for its very existence, fallen in love with Epi Info, found myself at a complete loss for how to do anything with Epi Info, taken advantage of the wireless internet in the Concejo office to avoid working on all of the above, shared a taxi with a Ministry of Public Health vaccine team, developed an addiction to Galak cookies, beaten Super Jewel Quest on my cell phone, said “chuta,” “chévere,” and “sigue no más” about 500 times, navigated river rapids in an inner tube, finished reading Pathologies of Power, eaten twice my weight in home-made bread, gone birdwatching, made a 16-hour round trip by bus to visit one of the 4 other remaining MSIDers for her birthday, developed an obsession with the artwork of Oswaldo Guayasamín, made arrangements to do our survey in two communities (18 to go!), sweat more than I did during my entire hockey career, and learned to sleep through thunderstorms, bulldozers outside my window, screaming kids, yelling adults, barking dogs, crowing roosters, and my alarm clock.

Put that way, this semester sounds almost productive.

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