Day 2: June 11, 2007: Analysis of the sustainability of vegetarians in the Dominican Republic

After surviving the thunder storm, we headed down for our free breakfast at the hotel. Not quite service with a smile but some decent huevos and some delicious café. Then we were off for our first meeting at PAI (Programa Ampliado de Inmunización). We have been very fortunate to have a lot of support there. They’ve been nice enough to offer us an office at the PAI headquarters. We even have a phone. It’s nice.

At the initial meeting we met with 4 people from PAI and our main collaborator from Hospital Infantil Robert Reid Cabral. It quickly became evident that Azucena was going to do most of the talking for this study since my Spanish vocabulary has disappeared since my last Spanish class in 1996 and Mike and Sapun aren’t quite confident with their skills yet (they’re actually quite good). Anyway, we made due and got a lot accomplished. The plan is for us to do a practice interview at PAI tomorrow with people who work there and then to start real interviews on Wednesday. The nice folks at PAI will setup meetings for us with the Ministry of Health area managers, who then will hopefully set up meetings with the clinicians in that area. I hope that all works out.

I’m starting to feel like we’re in an (obscure) adventure movie or role-playing game where we interact with various characters on our journey to find some magic potion or something. Some of them we’ve heard of before and even communicated with (like foreshadowing in a movie) but then you come face to face with a character and you start to understand their role and why you should talk to them and why they want to talk to you. This afternoon we met with a woman I will call “The Oracle”. It turns out she may have been responsible for getting PAI on our side and facilitating the whole project. And she gave us 2 gold coins. I’m just kidding.

Sapun has begun his study “Analysis of the sustainability of vegetarians in the Dominican Republic”. He has already run into some trouble. At lunch he ordered a cheese sandwich and asked the guy, “solamente queso?” and he said “si” and then brought him a ham and cheese sandwich. For dinner, “the girls” (two local med students we are working with) brought over some takeout mofongo (mashed plantains) and asked for no meat on one of them. That, of course, was interpreted as no extra meat on the side, which came with the rest, but still plenty of meat in the mofongo itself. Zing! Hopefully this gets better or Sapun will have to start eating grass.

-Rich