My roommate from Nashville, Aruna, came to Atlanta for the weekend to help me celebrate my 31st birthday. We spent the day shopping, eating out, getting our nails done, and exploring Atlanta together. It was wonderful to spend that time together!
August was about settling in to work - mostly paperwork! I started getting my stuff settled in to my office (me, an office? oh my gosh!), learning the ropes of working in a government agency, trying to organize my time and meet the rest of the malaria branch, get thinking about potential projects, and get some of the required online courses out of the way. I also had one week of classes sponsored by the division, for me and the EIS officer in the other parasites part of the branch. It was so much fun to re-learn about all of the parasites, from the folks who have been working on them all of their lives! I spent several hours most evenings studying for medicine boards.
I took Internal Medicine Boards on August 21st, and was very glad to have 1 of 2 boards over with. To celebrate, I went out to dinner at an Indian restaurant with a few friends!August 22-24, I had to take a course for US personnel traveling abroad for longer than 30 days. Some of it was very useful and interesting, such as a fascinating segment on cross cultural communication, focusing on body language variance across cultures. (ie, look someone from the Middle East straight in the eye, do not do so in Korea) Other was useful, if not interesting (how to access healthcare abroad). Most was neither - how many times do I really need to hear about bioterrorism, WMDs, and how to survive a hijacking and hostage situation?
After a few frantic days trying to pack and get ready, and praying for clearance to come from the US embassy in Niger, I was off to Niamey, Niger with a statistician (and PDA survey specialist) from our branch on August 28th.
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