Saviors
I met a couple of my heroes today, on a medical excursion to the nearby village of Alto Ongota. Both of them are government employees, incidentally.
Alto Ongota
#1 was the elementary school teacher. As he described the situation in the village to me, with its multitude of problems and unsatisfied needs, his eyes had a spark that hinted at the intelligence behind them. He spoke with sincere interest about the two important impressions he tries to leave with his students. First, he described the curriculum’s (his) attempts to instill in the students a sense of identity and cultural worth, fighting Ecuador’s colonial hangover by teaching the children to be proud of their indigenous heritage. Soy de Alto Ongota, soy Quichua, y tengo orgullo. Then he described how important it was for them to know the richness of their environment, and understand the impacts of the deforestation going on around them. As he pointed out the little car in which he commutes the gravel road to and from Tena every day, I couldn’t help but wonder: “What is he sacrificing to be here?” Or maybe, due to the government’s savvy decision to pay teachers more for working in rural and economically depressed areas, it’s not such a sacrifice after all.
#2 was the dentist on the 3-person medical team. White skin and professional degree firmly establishing his place at the top of the social order, here he was in a storage room-turned-makeshift-dentists’-office, using a portable kit to drill away at the cavities that riddled the teeth of every single kid. At a rate of 4.5 minutes per kid, neither the smile nor the line of sweat ever left his face. And just like that, 25 children, who would likely otherwise never see a dentist, got a cavity filled; something that cost me $80 (just for the filling, after insurance) the last time I had to get it done in the States. He’s originally from Quito, so you know he’s sacrificing something- rarely do you see someone migrate from the city to the Amazon; the opportunities gradient runs strongly in the opposite direction. Maybe working in a government clinic in Tena was simply the only job he could find when he graduated. Or maybe he just likes to see poor kids smile.
Cristian the dentist
Unrelated anecdote: I learned something today. I need to work on keeping from jumping to conclusions, especially when they come to me all pre-formed. When I first arrived at the community this morning, I went over and inspected the latrines (a pretty crucial weapon in the war on diarrhea) right away. I found them in a sorry state of affairs: overgrown with grass and weeds, the absence of trampling at the entrance an obvious sign of disuse. Clearly, I thought to myself, sanitation still isn’t a cultural value for these people; they must prefer to do their business in the jungle. If I had then thought, Poor dears, it wouldn’t have added much condescension to my little internal monologue.
Only later did I discover the new bathrooms behind the school buildings. They really were bathrooms, not just latrines, with bright white flushing toilets, and clear signs of use. Only there wasn’t any water with which to flush them- the village is dependent on a water source that is only replenished when it rains. Apparently waterless days like today are not uncommon.
Moral of the story: the way we think about hygiene is just one of the many privileges of our affluence. It was easy for me to look down on the people of Alto Ongota for what I perceived as their neglect of the latrines, but that’s only because I have had continuous access to soap, abundant water, and a functioning toilet for my entire life, not to mention an upbringing (cover your nose and mouth when you sneeze!) that has drilled into me, time and time again, the importance of hygiene. See, poverty has this hideous way of comprehensively disadvantaging a person: after a lifetime spent without developing hygiene habits, using the new latrine is not going to be a pressing concern on your mind, no matter what that man in the blue Centro de Salud polo is saying in your second language. If you have to work all day in the field under the tropical sun to cultivate enough of the tasteless yuca to feed your kids, are you really going to waste your little fuel on boiling water for them? And the benefits of good hygiene are likely to be invisible to you, anyway- will you notice if your kids get sick with slightly less frequency (if it changes at all, since dozens of factors remain uncorrected)?
And if there’s no water to wash your hands anyway, does it really matter?
Calvario
Tested my FWD today, by accompanying a team of 2 doctors and a nurse out to a village called Calvario (the name may or may not be correlated with the huge blazing-white cross visible on the cliff across the valley, a strange sight when everything else in view is swallowed by the jungle), about 30 minutes from Tena. Well, it would have been 30 minutes if one of the bridges hadn’t been closed to vehicle traffic so they could replace some of its termite-eaten planks. Fortunately, instead of having to hike the rest of the way, we managed to hitch a ride with the guys bringing the wood down from somewhere up in the hills (the only vehicle I saw on the road all day, though that may or may not have been because people knew the bridge was out). It was a bumpy, uneventful trip- except for when the trailer decided to suddenly unhitch itself. After arguing in Quichua for a while, our hosts re-attached the trailer, secured it by lashing it together with rope, and we continued on our merry way- three in the cab, myself and two others hanging off the back of the jeep, and three riding on the trailer.
Our task for the morning was to inspect the situation of the water storage/treatment jugs that had been previously distributed to the community in an effort to reduce the prevalence of water-borne parasites and, of course, diarrheal infections. The protocol is as follows: fill the big blue tank (clearly labeled with the Ministerio de Salud Pública (MSP) logo of which I’m becoming so fond) to the top with water, add two bottle capfuls of bleach (which, being photosensitive, must be stored in an opaque container, otherwise it quickly becomes useless), secure the lid tightly, and let it sit for half an hour before using. Simple enough, right? Welcome to community health.
Out of the 16 houses we visited, 7 were unoccupied, the family likely at school and at work in the chakra. Of the nine homes we did inspect, only one had been storing the bleach properly- the rest had it sitting around in clear plastic water or Coke bottles (in one case, sitting on a shelf in the sun!). Nobody had an opaque container, so we had each mother wrap a bottle in a black plastic shopping bag, and filled it part way from the bottle we carried. In none of the homes did we find the jug with the lid firmly secured, probably due to poor design- we could only seem to get them shut properly with two people pushing on it, imagine a Tupperware with a poorly fitting lid, one side popping out as soon as you secure the other. One tank had a broken lid, another was filthy, and the only evidence we could find of the tank in one house was a shard of blue plastic in the dirt. One woman was in the process of washing hers as we approached- likely having been forewarned of our visit by her neighbors. She properly added the bleach we gave her, but had contaminated the jug’s spigot on the slimy concrete slab underneath the faucet (another design flaw- the mouth of the spigot is flush with the bottom of the jug, so that it touches the ground unless placed on an elevated surface like a shelf or countertop [Edit: I got the chance to examine one of the jugs in the clinic the other day, and I had remembered this point wrong: the spigot does indeed have a couple centimeters of clearance]).
The only occupants of one house we visited were the grandmother, who only spoke Quichua, and her 5-year-old grandson, whose bloated abdomen displayed a textbook case of intestinal worms. Through the grandmother’s feeble attempts at Spanish, and the grandson’s translation, we determined that the mother was currently in Tena at the hospital because of some condition with her head. When we asked to open the water jug, we discovered it was being used as a vat to ferment chicha (the traditional alcoholic drink made from ground yuca, a somewhat distant relative of the potato).
And there you have it: my first ever real community health experience.
Semi-unrelated anecdotes from the day:
1) During our walk through the village, we came across the pre-school, which didn’t have an MSP jug but the teacher said she boils water for the kids. I’m inclined to believe her, if only because there was a functioning stove with large metal cauldrons. We also went over to the primary school, where most of the 36 students who attend 1st through 7th grade were out in the field, training for the Tena youth athletic competition this weekend by running barefoot in the rocky grass.
2) At one house we visited, I counted 23 beer bottle caps in the dirt between the gate and the front door.
3) I learned some indigenous medicine: apparently if you have a stomach-ache, you should boil tobacco in some water, and rub the solution on your belly to make it go away.
4) We didn’t have a ride back down the mountain, so we ended up walking in the sun for about an hour. On the way I counted 19 species of butterfly (though that number is likely inflated if males and females of the same species have different morphologies), including the spectacular Blue Morpho, and others with combinations of neon colors I never would have imagined to exist in nature .
5) I fell in love with the countryside. I wish I had brought my camera (will not duplicate that mistake); I’m too poor of a writer to adequately describe the breathtaking views of forested valleys, or the way life seems to spring from every inch of soil, saturating the earth with green in the never-ending struggle to survive and reproduce. Living in the city, it’s easy to forget the ferocity of that conflict, or the frailty of our own existence, but we are all part of it every day, all the same.
Four Wheel Drive
Hello from the Amazon! Things are kind of crazy for me right now- I’m in the process of switching from “working” in the hospital to “working” for the Ministry of Public Health in their community health programs. Why the sudden switch, almost halfway through my time here? That’s the subject of the rambly bit below. But before I lose you all to Acute Boredom Syndrome, I just wanted to share how excited I am for what my life is about to become. As I was walking with the director of the regional branch of the MSP to his office, he described to me how their teams head deep into the selva, to remote villages only accessible by canoe and on foot. Then, he suddenly turned to me and asked: “¿Eres cuatro por cuatro?” (Literally: Are you four by four? Roughly: do you have 4-wheel drive?) Having misheard him, I was about to explain that I don’t have any sort of vehicle, when I realized he was asking about me: am I equipped for offroading. That’s all I needed to hear to decide if I was making the right choice in leaving the hospital.
DISCLAIMER: I’m now going to subject you to some of my world-famous incoherent reflections, this time on the subject of the role of personal gratification in medicine. “A la mitad del mundo, Inc.” takes no responsibility for injuries or loss of personal belongings.
I started out having a blast in the hospital, getting to see and do really cool stuff. But that’s part of the problem: I didn’t come here to do cool stuff. It’s an unbelievable rush to help a real doctor stitch a patient’s hand back together, reconnecting severed tendons in the process, or watch an infant take his first breaths, but again, that’s not why I’m here. I’m here because little kids are dying for no good reason in this crazy messed-up world, and I want to know why, and what needs to happen for that to change.
After the second night in the ER, I found myself being strongly tempted by the field of trauma surgery. It’s a very attractive and gratifying way to deal with your ambivalence, going into pretty much any form of specialized medicine. You see a problem: a 7-year-old boy screaming with pain from a broken femur. And you can fix it. You can fix him- all you need are a few screws, an operating room, and a few years of specialized training and expertise. And voila! You have played God: a broken leg is now healed by your own two hands.
Infectious disease, I think, has a similar pull for me. A patient comes in with lungs full of TB, or hideous pustules all over his skin, and, if you can be just clever enough to get the antibiotics right, you can heal him.
You can be a cardiac surgeon, and extend by 20 years the life of someone who previously had less than a snowflake’s chance in Hell of seeing her grandson’s wedding. You can be a hero.
But look at this figure:
That, my friends, is UNICEF’s breakdown of the causes of child mortality worldwide. If you include neonatal deaths, diarrhea, a condition that should never be fatal (except perhaps in the most extreme cases), accounts for a full 17% of the total causes of child deaths, some 1.7 million every year.
And all you need in order to save them is some water with sugar and salt.
So what do you do? Diarrhea isn’t exactly the most glorious disease to treat- I almost lost my lunch in the hospital the other day when I examined the contents of one kid’s diaper. It’s also boring as hell in the hospital- kid comes in with dehydration, so you give him a rehydration solution, either by mouth or intravenously depending on the severity of the case. Then you watch him for the next few hours as the signs of dehydration slowly start to disappear, load up his mother with some zinc tablets and more packets of ORS, tell them to keep giving him food, and send them on their way.
Nobody should die of diarrhea. And yet they do. So what do you do?
You sit and think. You look at health statistics. You figure out what the strongest determinants of diarrheal infections are- poor sanitation, poor personal hygiene, etc. You discover that the poorest 20% of children in Ecuador are almost five times more likely to suffer an episode of diarrhea with severe dehydration than the richest 20%. Their likelihood is two times greater if their mother calls herself “indigenous,” rather than “mestizo,” and three times greater than the children of “white” parents in Ecuador. You haven’t found the relevant data yet, but you have a hunch that the mortality rates of diarrhea are far higher in remote rural areas, where educated parents are rare and access to medicine is limited, and water quality is inadequate, at best.
You’re still stuck though. What do you do with this information? How do you get packets of ORS into the hands of every community and into the mouth of every kid? How do you teach every mother how to check for signs of dehydration, that you’re not just wasting water by giving it to a vomiting child, and how to make adequate solutions of sugar and salt if ORS is unavailable or the kid won’t drink it? How do you fight social problems like paternal neglect? How do you end the grinding structural violence, the economic power systems that leave people without running water, or toilets, or electricity and fuel to boil water to drink?
And you can devote your life to this, and likely never see the results of your work. Gratification in public health is delayed, if it comes at all. The best you can hope for is a non-event: “nobody died during that cholera outbreak,” or slight changes in regional health statistics that may or may not have anything to do with your interventions at all. And after all, the grinding poverty and oppression and structural violence will still remain. Is this what you really want to do? Can you do anything else, though? It has to be done.
So you switch into four wheel drive.
Where’s David?
Here’s a brief recap of all that has happened since my last post, oh so long ago:
Finished up my last week of classes. Woo! As I was leaving I managed to snag from Cimas a Spanish copy of Where There Is No Doctor, the friggin’ gold standard of rural community health.
4-day spur-of-the-moment trip to Bogotá, Colombia. Um, what? I’m still struggling to believe this happened. Bogotá is an amazing city though, and I definitely want to get back there someday, and hopefully see more of the Colombia if possible. I can’t help but feel sad that such a beautiful country with such wonderful people has such a terribly exaggerated reputation of drug trafficking and violence. To be honest, I felt far safer the entire time in Bogotá than I did in Quito. Here are some pictures!
Downtown Bogotá from the mountainside
The Plaza Simón Bolívar
We paused our bike tour for a llama break.
Moved to Tena. It is hot. No internet at my house; TGFIC*. Needless to say, my communication with the outside world is going to be somewhat inhibited during this time.
A 25-hour shift in the hospital. Not even going to try to describe all the crazy things that happened during this. Now I know the feeling my dad was describing when he would say he was “post-call,” though to be honest I got way more sleep than any of the actual doctors/residents/nurses that night.
Went on a super-intense hike through the jungle. Also swam in a lagoon, drank chicha, and danced to indigenous music played by my host father’s friend and like 15 of his grandchildren. The perks of living in the Amazon. More pictures!
The overgrown hiking trail. Pura selva.
Climbing up waterfalls. Nbd.
Some flowers or whatever.
[Update: the full album is here]
That pretty much brings us up to now. It’s hard to believe that tomorrow will mark 3 months since I first stepped wide-eyed off the plane in Quito, and even harder to believe that my program ends in less than a month and a half. Current plans are to travel to Peru immediately after, and fly to Minnesota from Lima on the 20th of December, so if you’re in the greater Twin Cities area any time between then and the 3rd(ish) of January, let me know!
*First person to guess this acronym gets… I dunno. Sumthin.
It’s official!
I am signed up for the MSID Ecuador academic year program, and there is no turning back. Well, I guess there could be, but it’d be too much of a hassle, really. I know two things right now: 1) I made the right decision (thanks for all your input by the way! I don’t know if I could have done it without so much encouragement) and 2) I am going to miss you guys like crazy. I know this because I already do.
Stay tuned for a possible Minnesota visit around Christmastime!
Paul Farmer
I’m not entirely clear on what legally counts as fair use of copyrighted content in this situation, but I’m going to excuse what I’m about to do by strongly plugging the book from which the following excerpt comes: Tracy Kidder’s amazing biography of Paul Farmer, called “Mountains Beyond Mountains.” I want you to read it. If you don’t have a way to borrow it, I want you to buy it. Hell, I’ll buy it for you: just add it to your Amazon wishlist, send me the link, and I will seriously pay for it. Happy birthday (This offer also includes any Cloud Cult cd). It will inspire you and rock your world, or at least it should.
The following is one of my favorite passages in the entire book. It is a perfect definition of my mentality and motivation, summing up why I want to do what I want to do. It’s not idealism, it’s not sacrifice; it’s the only way I know of to deal with the pressure that has built up in my head (and it’s probably not healthy, but hey, that’s never stopped me).
He told me he slept about four hours a night but a few days later confessed: “I can’t sleep. There’s always somebody not getting treatment. I can’t stand that.”
Little sleep, no investment portfolio, no family around, no hot water… I wondered aloud what compensation he got for these various hardships. He told me, “If you’re making sacrifices, unless you’re automatically following some rule, it stands to reason that you’re trying to lessen some psychic discomfort. So, for example, if I took steps to become a doctor for those who don’t have medical care, it could be regarded as a sacrifice, but it could also be regarded as a way to deal with ambivalence.” He went on, and his voice changed a little. He didn’t bristle, but his tone had an edge: “I feel ambivalent about selling my services in a world where some people can’t buy them. You can feel ambivalent about that, because you should feel ambivalent. Comma.”
This was for me one of the first of many encounters with Farmer’s use of the word comma, placed at the end of a sentence. It stood for the word that would follow the comma, which was asshole. I understood he wasn’t calling me one–he would never do that; he was almost invariably courteous. Comma was always directed at third parties, at those who felt comfortable with the current distribution of money and medicine in the world. And the implication, of course, was that you weren’t one of those. Were you?
Paul Farmer is my hero, my idol, my impossible blueprint for an ideal life. You should check out his organization Partners in Health, and strongly consider supporting it if you can.
David steps on a stingray; hilarity does not ensue
So there I am, peacefully attempting to bodysurf in the Pacific ocean in Atacames (a beach town on the northern coast near Esmeraldas), when all of a sudden, coming down off of a wave I feel something sharp impale my foot.
First thought: aw, crap, I stepped on a pointy piece of driftwood.
Second thought: DEAR GOD WHY DOES IT HURT SO BAD?
Third thought: oh no oh no I must have stepped on a needle and now I have AIDS!
Fourth thought: I should probably hobble over to the shore- WHY DOES IT HURT SO BAD?
At this point, with images of a massive spike sticking straight through my foot playing in my head, I pull it out of the water to see blood collecting on my instep. No sign of any foreign object, and my needle fears grow stronger (ever since I was a little kid I’ve had this terrible [irrational?] terror of stepping on a needle in the sand; thank you, Karachi beach).
I manage to crawl, panting and swearing all the way, to a point on the sand where I can sit mostly unmolested by the waves, and proceed to further inspect the wound. By a remarkable coincidence, the only time I see lifeguards all weekend happens to be at this very moment- at least I think they were lifeguards; they were carrying those big red foam things, after all. They take one look at me writhing in agony in the sand, and keep walking. Fortunately for my opinions on Ecuadorian lifeguards, my bro Isaac manages to be a little more effective at getting their attention, and they walk over, as if to see what one of those crazy gringos is doing this time. I explain the problem, twisting my leg up to display the sand-encrusted wound in all its glory: I stepped on something in the water, don’t know what it was, but it hurts real bad. Their diagnosis: some Spanish word I’ve never heard before. “¿Qué?” “Una raya, una raya pequeña.” Yay! Stingray! That’s a word I know!
“WHY DOES IT HURT SO BAD?!” I demand uselessly in English. Then, in Spanish, with slightly more sanity: “what should I do?” They point me in the direction of the Red Cross station. On the other side of the beach. At this point, the aforementioned Isaac and my other bro Dane yell something like “We have to take David to the hospital!” to the rest of our group, throw my arms around their shoulders, and take off dragging me down the beach. After what felt like an eternity of inventing creative new combinations of swear words, we make it to the Red Cross, throw open the gate, and then stand there uselessly in the middle of an empty courtyard. Hey, ho, nobody home. After yelling ¡Buenos días! at the closed doors a few times produces no visible effect, we hobble back outside, Dane begins a marathon run back to the hostel to find my insurance information (which turned out to be unnecessary, fortunately, since we never told him to which clinic we were headed, not knowing that information ourselves), and Isaac and I hail a taxi.
Taxi is probably too charitable of a word for the primary mode of transportation in Atacames. Imagine a padded bench with wheels welded onto a moped, and you get the idea. I normally don’t have a problem with the little deathtraps (I think they’re way fun) but this particular model has the passenger seating in front of the driver (presumably to protect him in the very likely event of a head-on collision). Fortunately, being a human shield in a rickety little transportation contraption careening through town manages to pump me full of adrenaline, taking my mind off the pain just enough to give poor Isaac a brief respite from my barrage of complaints and profanity.
We arrive at the clinic, and right away I get a view of the Ecuadorian health care system from the inside. No snarky comments here; it turns out to be fast, efficient and (for a foreigner) cheap (Note: the clinic that is, certainly not the health care system as a whole): $13 for two injections of a local anesthetic, cleaning and disinfection, ace bandages, some Cipro to stave off infection, and an anti-inflammatory drug. I shudder to think what that little bit of care would have cost in the USA, land of the free [market's ability to ramp up health care costs to obscene heights]. At one point though, after ordering me to take a shower to cleanse myself of the sand caking my entire body (which must have been from when I was rolling on the beach cursing Poseidon), the nurse shows me to the bathroom, where a child, presumably her daughter, happens to be using the toilet. Without a word, she grabs her by the hand and yanks her off, assuring me that, yes, she is finished. Gringo privilege in a tourist town.
The rest of the story is pretty uneventful. The anesthetic wore off (using present tense through an entire story is draining and awkward, I’m switchin’) as soon as I walked out of the clinic, and I was left with a deep throbbing pain that reached halfway up my shin for about another 3 1/2 hours. Then, abruptly, it was all gone, and all I have to show for my trouble is a tiny little scar on the bottom of my foot. Overrated, I say. Excuse me while I now go search Wikipedia for the mechanism of stingray venom’s effects on the nervous system.
Photoblag
I have finally managed to upload all my latest photos to the interwebs. The trip from Riobamba to Alausí is here, the Inca ruins are here, Cuenca is here, Otavalo is here, and jungle photos from last weekend’s trip to Mindo are here. Since that’s quite a lot to subject y’all to, I’ve picked out a few of my favorites for you (below the fold so the main page still loads ok). Read more…
Ecuadorian Politics
Since Ecuador is technically in a state of emergency, I figured I owe you at least one blog post on it.
We were on the second day of a two-day field trip to observe the integration of traditional indigenous medicine in hospitals and clinics in Otavalo and Cotacachi, two cities in the northern Sierra with large indigenous populations, when we heard the first news of unrest in Quito. I’ll spare you my attempts to sum up what happened and let you read this article instead. We ended up being stuck in Otavalo for another night, since all interprovincial traffic was suspended for a while, and our program decided it was safest for us to wait it out up there. We ended up traveling back to Quito without incident this morning.
As I write this, everything has pretty much calmed down. The streets are open, the buses are running, and people are at work as usual. The administration of the police force is kind of in limbo right now (pretty much everyone involved in the strike/coup is gonna get the axe), but law and order have been restored. It will be interesting to see how everything shakes out in the next few weeks. Long story short: if you’ve seen scary stuff in the news, I am fine, and hopefully this country will be fine too. I have a feeling President Correa is going to gain a lot of sympathy from this, which is good, because he is doing great things for Ecuador. [Edit: Of course, politics is complex, and so in hindsight I feel that I have to qualify this oversimplified analysis. While I do appreciate many of the policies Correa has implemented during his presidency, I can't say I give him my unequivocal support.]
I am bad at decisioning
So I am seriously considering extending my stay here through second semester. Eep!
Here’s the deal: if I continued through the spring semester part of the program, I would get to pursue my internship for 5 months, rather than 6 short weeks. This would mean a real research project, and hopefully a far deeper immersion into the field of public health.
Some preliminary pros and cons:
Pros: Real public health research! Woo! The chance to study important things. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love my biochemistry major. Deep down, I am a total science nerd, only slightly eclipsed by Tarini, among others. But since coming to Ecuador, I haven’t missed it at all. While a deep understanding of science is absolutely fundamental to medicine, and Na+/K+ ATPases still rock my world, I just feel like it would be hard to go back to studying molecules with all these huge questions about life, development, and social justice firmly planted in my head.
Oh yeah, other pros. Obviously, the chance to stay in this phenomenally beautiful country for twice as long. With that comes (hopefully) real Spanish fluency, and many more chances to develop real friendships and connections with people here; investing myself in this country so that it would be really worth it to come back someday. Then there’s also the great structure MSID provides; if I didn’t stay for spring, I would likely try to come back to Latin America for some volunteer work next summer, and I doubt I could find the same kind of opportunities for involvement and learning that I’ve got going on right now.
Cons: The biggest one obviously has a lot to do with you: it’s kind of hard to imagine going a whole 9 months without my excellent friends and family back “home.” This is compounded by the fact that I will be spending all but 3 weeks away from Cimas, meaning that the rest of the time I’ll be pretty much isolated from everyone else that is my age and that speaks my language. While it would obviously be a great opportunity for immersion, I’ve realized that I really draw a lot of support from my friends, and 5 months looks like a really long time to live in that kind of isolation. Second is the fact that the credits I would get from the spring program would be completely useless to me, academically. I believe I would still be able to graduate on time (though every class would have to schedule out perfectly), but the idea of paying for an academic program that’s not helping me get my degree seems like a bit of a waste to me. Though, that is probably just my inability to think outside the box and “never let school get in the way of [my] education” speaking.
Right now it looks like the pros are winning (my initial gut instinct is also to just do it), but I’m feeling extremely hesitant to go ahead with it, and I’m not 100% sure why.
I mean, help me out, guys? What should I do? I think I have about a month to finalize my decision, but the earlier the better, really, since the length of my internship will determine the scope of the research topic I choose to tackle, and I need to get working on that yesterday.
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Update: The recent political unrest has had exactly zero impact on my decision process.
