To Orangewalk (Part 1)

This is the first of what I am sure will be many posts about the Mt. Sinai first-year student trip to Belize that will take place next April. Somehow, I ended up as the coordinator for one of the two sites that students will be going to, though I have a feeling that I may yet regret the decision to take on that role. I know that it will take quite a bit of work to coordinate the trip, but I'm hoping that since a good portion of the planning legwork has already been done by the now-second-year students who went to Belize last year, I will be able to build off of what they did.

The trip itself sounds like it can be really interesting: it will be roughly 5 days of a mix of rural medical experience working in local clinics around the city of Orangewalk in the northwest of Belize along with public health education in local schools. At today's information session, roughly 45 first-year students showed up and said they were interested in going on the trip, which is wonderful considering that the entire class is only about 125 students. We're hoping to whittle that number down to about 30 students by the end of next week, half of which would be going to Orangewalk and the other half would be going to a city in the southwest called San Ignacio.

I'm excited about the trip, and I think it will be a great experience. I'm in charge of the data collection and epidemiology component of the trip, that will hopefully be used to modify how subsequent trips are organized by future Sinai students.