Homesick :/

Mom called it. After the excitement of being in a new place and making friends, I miss home. I miss the effortless enjoyment of Emily's company. I miss my friends, the fall leaves, Olive. I miss my weekly talks with Mom and Pierre
That has been hitting me pretty hard lately, although I don't mean to suggest there haven't been plenty of bright spots, too. I'm still finding my way at work, and trying to find/create a community of friends here that I can do things like climb with. Sometimes it seems like a lot of the Peruvians I meet want to go to malls and clubs, which isn't really my scene :/ So I'm going to keep looking around for friend prospects. This may sound confusing because I have my best friend Jeff with me, but we realized a while ago that we needed our own space for various reasons, including being able to speak more Spanish.
We are still working at Hipolito, although this week we were asked to help out with a quality control project involving another clinical trial that also studies tuberculosis but in the hospital context and on the screening/diagnosis side rather than treatment. We were happy to learn more about what seemed like a really cool study, and we were also excited by the prospect of getting to explore the hospital more. The socios en salud office is tucked away in a corner of the hospital grounds and we haven't actually spent much time in the various wings of the main building or in the emergency department. So it was extremely interesting to get to roam around, mapping the different units, the consult services, operating rooms, and the rest. Our job is more or less to try to get a grasp of patient flow in the hospital to try to make sure all potential study participants are seen by the field workers. It turns out it can be tricky to know for sure where patients go or where they come from in a busy public hospital that uses all paper charts! So that's been a fun short-term project to help out with, especially since we've gotten to give a lot of input. It's been nice to learn about how the hospital works and to feel valued by the quality control coordinator. Being back in a hospital also made me realize how much I miss talking to patients and makes me excited to organize some clinical rotations while I'm here.
Another win on the work front is that at a Medecins Sans Frontieres meeting the Socios director presented Jeff and my patient adherence data graphs that we had spent a lot of time on. A modest contribution, but definitely worth a high-five!
Some other highlights of the last few weeks:
-walking around the magic water show last night in downtown - I think it holds the record for biggest water-based light show in the world
-putting up decorations in my room to make it homier, including a bunch of pictures from Rochester that Em sent me :)
-practicing soccer juggling with Jeff. My goal is to master the around-the-world move (dang Jeff got it on like his second try!)
-buying myself a cajon as an early bday present (basically a Peruvian wooden box that sounds like a drum set)
-going to the theater to see a comedy called Toc Toc about 6 patients with various forms of OCD (despite not quite understanding all of the jokes, it was definitely funny!)
-dressing up as Mario along with Jeff as Luigi for Halloween (we got lots of smiles on the bus ride to a friend's house)
-walking around my neighborhood, which is such a nice and quiet haven from a sometimes exhaustingly loud city (although the tranquility was momentarily disrupted for a few hours when a neighbor celebrated her birthday with a kick-ass live band that played salsa and cumbia late into a Monday night)
-enjoying murder mysteries (not my usual cup of tea) in Spanish, one a tv show on Netflix and another a book that Hansel lent me (his all-time fave!)

Speaking of tea, I'm enjoying a nice cup of mate de coca tea right now, made from some leaves I brought back from Huaraz. It tastes like artichokes in the best possible way :)