A Beginning

Welcome! As I embark on a new adventure, I am beginning a new blog. I am very glad that many of you enjoyed reading Adventures with my Aunt Arctica, about my research at Palmer Station, Antarctica. I greatly appreciate all of your encouragement and feedback!

In four days I will board a plane for Mumbai, where I will begin a four-month journey through South Asia and the Middle East. I do not know how much access I will have to computers along the way, so this blog may not be as comprehensive as Adventures with my Aunt Arctica although I hope to share as much as possible about what I learn along my way.

I am very excited to meet my boyfriend Edgar in India, where he has spent the past ten months as a fellow at the Comprehensive Rural Health Project (CRHP). Located in Jamkhed, a small town east of Mumbai, CRHP works to improve community health by providing comprehensive primary care and addressing underlying social issues such as illiteracy, casteism and the status of women. He is writing a blog about the social determinants of health and the challenges of international development.

We will first travel south to the city of Panaji in the state of Goa, where I will spend three weeks as an intern at an NGO called The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI). There, I will work on a water filtration well which is actually located in the neighboring state of Karnataka. As part of his fellowship in global health, Eddie will spend a week with a different NGO in Goa that focuses on mental health, after which he will return to Jamkhed. When I am finished at TERI, I will join him in Jamkhed and spend some time seeing what CRHP does. That brings us almost to the end of June, at which point we will head off to travel around India together. The heat and the monsoon will probably drive us north into the mountains, but who knows where we'll end up?

Stay tuned for my next post about my work at The Energy and Resources Institute...