What a place to be . . .

(Note: I tried to publish this a few weeks ago but accidentally saved it as a draft!!!! So a bit late, here you go . . .)

So I will sum up the past 9 days with the following words:

• 16 hours of meetings
• Only fully understanding 10% of said meetings
  
• Occupational health
  
• Translating documents
• A lot of Swedes
• Victoria and Toña beer
  
• "Jungle" farm with crocodiles, strange squirrel-marsupial-rodent-ish animals, and poisonous flying bugs
• Beach & Boogie boarding
• All-inclusive resort (food, booze, etc.)
• Doing a strip-tease dance and then dressing up like a woman in front of 100 people
  
• An embarrassing video
  
• My first Nica GI bug

Suffice it to say, I've had a great though interesting time! The volunteer work is great, and I am keeping busy. The center where I work (El Centro de Investigaciónes de Salud, Trabajo y Ambiente or "The Research Center for Health, Work and Environment") is a part of the national Nicaraguan university and is staffed by an amazing group of dedicated, brilliant people. The center focuses on occupational health issues, i.e. work related risks and dangers to health. It is a very interesting field that I feel I could easily end up in. But either way, I have no doubt that I will learn quite a lot about public health and development while here in Nicaragua!

For my part at the center, I am doing a lot of translating of documents from Spanish to English and also am editing documents in English (their English website is . . . let us say grammatically deficient http://www.cista-unan.net/ingles/index.htm). This experience should help me work on improving my Spanish somewhat!

The city of León is amazing. The food is cheap and the beer good! I am liking the lifestyle: taking it easy after work and going to the beach on the weekends (below is a picture from a resort called Barcelo Montelimar on the Pacific coast).



PS: If you want to hear the story about the strip dance and being in drag, you might just have to contact me directly . . . lol. I don't know if I would want to post the whole thing here; a little embarrassing! (and by the way, "strip dance" means I took off my shirt . . . not actually stripping nude!)

Med School PS: Stilling waiting to hear from the University of Utah on my application. They have not received the "official" copy from the application service . . . meanwhile I am writing away for my second personal statement, ug

Alcohol, Sleeping Pills, and Plane Flights = Bad Mix

Bueno! Estoy aqui en Nicaragua y todo esta perfecto. Nicaragua es muy bonita. Los volcanos son gigantes y es seguro que voy a subirlos!

So my red-eye flight flight to Nicaragua went well, though I found out just how dangerous sleeping pills can be! In the airport before I left Salt Lake, I grabbed a quick beer to settle myself down. My flight wasn't for about two hours so I figured that there would be enough time between taking a sleeping pill and drinking the beer (I know they say never mix them at all!). Anyway, I took the pill, and in the middle of the flight I might have passed out, ha! I got up to go to the bathroom and when I finally got there, stumbling a bit, everything nearly went black and the next thing I knew I was leaning against the bathroom wall. And amazingly no one heard or saw me despite the door being open! Let's just say I sat on the toilet for 10 minutes (and almost fell asleep) trying to pull myself together. I think it was not only the alcohol and Lunesta but also the fact that I had been sitting for two hours and all my blood had pooled in my legs.

But anyway, I got here alright and finally found out what I will be doing! But that may have to wait for another post.

PS: For those of you who know that me and traveling are a bad mix, I haven't lost ANYTHING yet! Keyword there may be "yet" . . .

Off to Nicaragua!

So in three days I leave for Nicarauga! This time, as opposed to Oaxaca, I will be a little more connected to the outside world (wireless internet at the place I am staying!). I will be out of the country from the 19th of this month to January 17th working in a public health clinic in León, about little ways from Managua the capital of Nicaragua. I should be posting pictures, stories, etc. here so check in every now and again for updates if you'd like! And drop me an email line or something :)

Oh, and I will have Skype access so a few people may be getting some random Latin American phone calls . . . !

Election Blues (but not for the reasons you think!)

So the elections have come and gone. What a day in the history of the United States. But there is one thing that bugs me: how many people still don't vote.

(Note to the person I am about to speak of: I know I gave you a hard time already so don't take the following too hard. I just want to make a point of this!)

Someone I know, a college student who lives with five other students, informed me tonight that NONE of the people at her house voted. Not one of them. Apparently, because they are students away from home in a different state from their own, they thought they could not vote. This even though with an official letter from a bank, a receipt for paying rent, or any other item confirming their address in [state they go to school in] they could have voted at school. When I asked if they had heard of absentee voting, they said they had . . . today.

Okay, this IS a problem. The fact that these concepts are not clear discourages me; the young adults of this country, the people who will (hopefully) be voting for many years, don't know heads or tails of this system. We really need to work on this country being more transparent and more politically active. Now I don't mean people have to go out into the streets and protest (though maybe that would be a GOOD thing), but that if six colleges students didn't know they could vote, something is wrong. For my part, I didn't take the time to talk about voting with this person who is very close to me. We all need to work on this. We claim to be a democracy, but if so few people vote or so many from a particular group don't vote, is a democracy really what we have? We complain that this country is going to shit; there are cries from the left, right, top and bottom of the political spectrum, but we still have an abysmally low voter turn compared to so many other countries. See the table below for proof! (pulled from Voter Turnout)

Country	elections #	Turnout
Australia	14	95%
Malta	6	94%
Austria	9	92%
Belgium	12	91%
Italy	9	90%
Luxembourg	7	90%
Iceland	10	89%
New Zealand	12	88%
Denmark	14	87%
Germany	9	86%
Sweden	14	86%
Greece	10	86%
Venezuela	7	85%
Czech Republic	2	85%
Brazil	3	83%
Netherlands	7	83%
Costa Rica	8	81%
Norway	9	81%
Romania	2	81%
Bulgaria	2	80%
Israel	9	80%
Portugal	9	79%
Finland	10	78%
Canada	11	76%
France	9	76%
United Kingdom	9	76%
Ireland	11	74%
Spain	6	73%
Japan	12	71%
Estonia	2	69%
Hungary	2	66%
Russia	2	61%
India	6	58%
United States	9	54%
Switzerland	8	54%
Poland	2	51%

Come on, let's get with it people. You can not care about politics during the hundreds of days between elections. But please just vote . . . on that ONE day out of so many. I know it has been said before and is annoyingly cliché, but on some level I don't care which way someone votes. Just do it. I'll deal with what I feel is right or wrong later . . .

Too Long

Okay . . . so I must apologize. I have not posted to this thing in a long time! I have been slacking a bit. Well, I am going to make a solid commitment to update this at least twice a month!

But anyway, to get on with what is going on in my life if you are interested, here is a summarized version of the past two-ish months:

• Oaxaca = great experience (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6102018.stm)
• MCAT = hellish but went well
  
• Med school = might just happen
• Work = milking umbilical cords and placentas; CD34+ stem cell miner
• Volunteer = Utah State Health Department: E. coli, spinach, stuff like that
  
• Plans for future? = Nicaragua for two months, then Costa Rica, Honduras

Personal Statement

So I applied to med school and had to write a personal statement, ug! Here it is . . . I hope it is alright, cause otherwise I am in deep shit

And as a disclaimer, the original version of this statement was MUCH more strongly worded. On the advice of others but against my real feelings, I unfortunately had to tone things down substantially. I think the original would have scared some admissions people because of its message. Let's just say I didn't mention a few things (keywords: heterosexuality, privilege, oppression, social justice, classism, etc.) as much as I would have liked.

---------------

My life has been the epitome of privilege in almost every way; I am male, upper-class, and able-bodied. So much of what I have has been handed to me. Growing up I always had plenty to eat, received proper health care, went to private schools, had the connections to get good jobs, lived in "nice" neighborhoods . . . the list goes on and on. But all the while, my parents also gave me something else. They instilled in me an interest in and respect for others' ways of life: I grew up in a church centered around exploring others' faiths, was exposed to my Japanese heritage and culture, was pushed to do volunteer work, and had opportunities to travel the world. Through these opportunities I began to see how privileged I am and how the inequities of this world--racism, sexism, poverty--limit others. I felt mad, upset, and ultimately guilty because I also realized that I am part of this system. I came to see that everyday of my life, I benefit at others' expense. My life will always be the product of what I receive and others are denied.

This realization left me frustrated. What could I do to change anything? I could neither single handedly change the world nor remove myself from its realities. I felt as though there was no place for me in a solution. From this place of feeling guilty and frustrated, answers were hard to come by. To come to a place from which I could act, I needed to find a way to rectify my position in the world and fulfill my desire to fight injustice. Over time and with the help of friends and mentors, I began to slowly emerge from this feeling of helplessness and see the irony of my situation.

In particular, the friends who helped me most were those who did not grow up with what I had. When I told them I felt guilty and impotent, they said "Well, on one hand you should, but at the same time you have a tool we don't: your privilege." They showed me that although my privilege is what unfairly gives me so much, it can also be a tool against the injustice of the world. As long as I refuse to forget my values and ideals, I can use my privileges--what I learn, the education I receive, my position in society--to do some good. If I use my voice and power to stand up against injustice in society, then the movement for change has that much more strength.

This desire to make a difference came to a head as I finished my undergraduate work. Outside of the classroom, I was exploring the world through my new found passion for social change. I worked with community service of all sorts, participated in discussion groups on social issues, and sought to learn as much as I could from others. Academically, my interests in understanding our connections to the physical world developed into a biology major, with a particular focus on human and environmental aspects of biology. With the real world fast approaching, I began searching for a career that would bring together these diverse interests, and medicine seemed like a logical combination.

As the son of a doctor, I grew up with exposure to the medical lifestyle and system. I worked at my mother's clinic, spent many childhood evenings with a babysitter while she was at the hospital, and at times listened to her vent when she can home. My mother taught me medicine is about people, about enabling others to improve their lives. Providing the potential for good health is key in allowing people to realize their fullest potential. Luckily, many aspects of our health care system work to this end. The sheer number and variety of new diagnostic tools, drugs, and therapies being developed is astounding. Yet for all these new technologies can do, they do not prevent diseases from happening in the first place. They do not change the environment and behaviors that lead to many diseases. In this way, modern medicine sometimes acts only as a band-aid, treating symptoms rather than addressing underlying causes of disease. This hurts most those with the least in society not only because there is little money for such band-aids, but also because so many live on environmentally contaminated land, without clean water and air, and without access to proper health education.

The connection between these problems and medicine is not always apparent because that key question "Why are people really getting sick?" is not always asked. I want to be a doctor who asks this question, who thinks about the underlying cause of disease. I want not only to treat people but also to prevent disease from happening in the first place. I want to use all I have received to give something back to others not so fortunate: the chance to have good health.

Public health medicine is a field that brings together everything I am passionate about, and all my experiences with it--volunteering at two state health departments, talking with my mother about her experiences, and shadowing an occupational medicine doctor in Washington for two days--have only reinforced this for me. This is a field that I feel I would fit into perfectly, one which would allow me to make a positive and meaningful difference.