Tickets Booked! = Adventurous Week Ahead

So it's on! I'm officially heading to the Amazonian state of Rondonia on Tuesday night! Rodrigo and I will be spending the remainder of the week there with a couple of goals in mind. First, we will be visiting a group of UNICAMP students who have been volunteering for the month of July in riverside communities near the Cunia Lake. They are providing primary health care to the populations of these riverside communities, who suffer from many diseases, including a high incidence of Malaria. They have a bi-directional satellite there, and they've been employing a crude form of telemedicine using Skype and digital images to consult with doctors back here in Campinas. Youtube videos here and here (both in Portuguese).

Since Edumed is working with the Rondonia state government on starting a telemedicine pilot program with a jungle health outpost, Rodrigo and I will be visiting the NAPRA students in Cunia to learn from their experiences. Their program has been going on for many years, and we hope to get an inside perspective on the obstacles, needs, and successful projects that come with providing telemedicine to a community in the Amazon rain forest.

To get to Lake Cunia, we must take a 5-hour boat ride down the Madeira River, followed by a 14km trek through the jungle. Obviously, the communities we will be visiting are impoverished, and we will be sleeping in hammocks with mosquito nets for the nights we are there. Do not worry, I'll be bringing my camera along, as we will be documenting almost everything we see there.

We will then return to Porto Velho, the capital of Rondonia, and hopefully we will have time to go to Cacoal, a city nearby where we will eventually implement the telemedicine pilot project. While we are there, we are going to test the connection of the satellite and other equipment to make sure it will be ready when we begin the program.

This weekend I'm going to have to shop for supplies, including said hammock and mosquito net, along with a few other essentials. I'm really excited to break out my backpack, but I'm beginning to worry that it will be too small. I think it should be fine, though.

Monday (and Tuesday, most likely) I'll begin a different project - a sort of report and investigation into community health centers here in Campinas. I will be visiting a couple of community health posts in different neighborhoods that differ in their socioeconomic affluence. I'll be collecting data about the center and the population it serves, as well as asking questions to see what kind of technology they are applying to their work and what kind of problems they are encountering. This, coupled with our Cunia trip, should be an interesting background and primer for my eventual report and analysis regarding the health post where we will install the telemedicine pilot. Unfortunately, it's likely, almost certain, that I'll be leaving to return to the States before the pilot gets underway, but the projected time frame is a couple of years, so I hope I will have plenty of opportunity to come back and get involved again.

So, I think that's the most of it. I'll be "off the grid" for a while, but we are running a twitter feed on our activities in Cunia and Cacoal - www.twitter.com/projetorondonia - Rodrigo will be posting in Portuguese, and I will be posting in English, and we'll be uploading pictures via TwitPic. So, if you so desire you can tune in to our adventures! I'll be writing my own blog post when I return!