sorry i've sort of gotten out of the habit of updating this. this past week i had my parents in town. after this week the dominicans and i have decided that we need to start bringing people to new places when they visit because we are sick of repeatedly going to the same places. i went with my parents to altos de chavon, around san pedro, and up to samana. we stayed in a cool little hotel run by a group of italians taht give the profits back into the community. they're also super into ecotourism and such.

in exciting work news from this week. i keep getting good news from the cancer patient. appearently she's feeling much better. i also spoke with a dominican born american doc who's a cancer specialist. he knows her doc, and is going to talk to her to make sure we're getting her the best care we can. so that was cool to make that connection with him this week. i've also in the past week spoken with a guy from a human rights organization out of costa rica (www.aguabuena.org) who lived and worked with HIV/AIDS stuff here in the DR. he's hooked me up with a list of hiv/aids treatment centers around the country. i was able to make a map with the info he gave me (i think i've included a working picture here), and i've found there's nothing happening in either san pedro or in the samana peninsula both are places where we're working. he also gave me some good contacts for people doing advocacy work here. i'm also hoping this week to get to la romana to speak with some docs from columbia university who are running a treatment program there. then at the end of the week i have another group of friends coming to visit. then a week of preparation and then we spend a full week in samana. i will be completing a community health survey there which i'm very excited about.

it was good today to get back into the swing of living in san pedro. i ran errands with milagros this morning. i got a tour of the university here, and i found it is in ways similar to UC although it is much much smaller. i also ran into a group of american girls about my age on a guagua who are doing an internship with a baptist church. that was interesting. i then spent the afternoon catching up on work and talking to my boss. i was able to convince milagros that i would be alright alone here tonight while she went to boca chica. so i am currently spending my second night ever alone in this place. it's been really good to get caught up on work stuff and on contacting some people. i've also gotten some good reading done. that's all for now.