Hey y'all.
So I only have one month left here and I cannot believe it. It is (and will be) very bittersweet, being that I miss you all terribly, but I like this country a lot. Hopefully some of you will return with me someday, there are some great mountains to climb :)
So I am a few days in to my Independent Study Project (ISP), and I am starting to like it. Honestly, there was quite a bit of panic the first few days when I found out my original topic did not exist, but I managed to fix that well enough. I set out wanting to study the decision making of the branches of government involved in health education of the general population, because in their public health system, they heavily emphasize prevention of disease. Interestingly enough, they are not making decisions based on epidemiological or statistical evidence, and there is no formal process for deciding which educational activities will receive funding. Not only is it a tax-dollar spending free-for-all, but there are multiple branches of the government doing to same job, and they barely know the other ones exist. Thus far I have come across five different branches of the government just in this tiny little city that are dealing with health education of the general populace (not even touching health ed in schools or the health education that the individual health offices do), and two of them I came across by mere luck and happenstance. And get this, two of them have the same name, are derivatives of the same branch of the Ministry of Health, do the same jobs, and never talk to each other! Moral of the story, despite not being able to work on the project I want to, I seem to have stumbled upon an interesting situation in and of itself, that no one was aware of before this. It seems like I have the ability to really change things and make their system more effective, if they want it to be (which I doubt). The sad part though, is that some of the teams I have been shadowing are under the impression I am here to study their social change model and bring it back to implement in the US (I promise my Spanish skills are not that bad that I told them that by accident). They are truly putting all their heart into their work, so I feel bad that when they read my report, they may not like what they see.
I have told Kristen and Jesse that the general kindness of Chileans and my panic over getting this project done have made me really ballsy. I have taken to walking into government offices and asking to speak with the person in charge, going to meetings in the evening with people I do not know, and walking up to people in the street to ask them what they are doing. The fact that they think Americans are so cool is definitely working to my advantage here, and I think that the general willingness to help people out who ask for it is going to be the thing I miss most about Chile when I get back to the US. Certainly you all, the people I love, are like that, but here it is a way of life.
In other news, I applied to five internships in DC for next semester, mostly working with providers of free healthcare to at-risk populations. I have not heard back from anyone yet, save an automatic response that they recieved my application. Prayers please! I'll keep you all posted on my progress.
I hope y'all are fully recovered from Sandy and are enjoying the snow :) Please update me on your lives when you get a chance, even though I am bad at doing that myself so I don't really deserve it :P
