mzung-zoo!!!

We're still getting a goat. DON'T WORRY. But now we also have a puppy!! We are creating a mzung-zoo!!!

Alternative name for this post: "A poopless dog is like a seedless watermelon. Convenient, but a little weird." (credit Jess Bloome) But then she pooped!!! Huge victory. I feel like a parent.

So we saw some people handing two puppies over a school wall, and as soon as we saw Ellie (short for Elephant) we were in love. I was a little worried about how much work she would be, and it turns out I was right about that part. I think she was too young to be taken from her mother, so at first she cried all night and we had a really hard time feeding her. Here Katie is trying to feed her with a hole in a plastic bag:

Luckily we discovered on day 2 that she would lap milk out of our hands. Well, a weird milk-egg-oil-vitamin formula I found online. And on Day 3, she started taking it out of a dish! HOORAY!! It's only slightly less messy, but still. Now we have 2 messy kids AND a messy dog. The dog is more work, though. Katie and I trade off taking care of the dog overnight, since she wakes us up to eat and whine whine whine!

But she's so cute!

I think she's doing much better. She doesn't cry as much during the night anymore, she's pooped and her pee is clear, and now she's playing!! SO CUTE


Yay! Puppy wuppy. At least she'll be well socialized, since there are about 1 million children over here all the time. Wish us luck taking care of her!

feena and hope photoshoot

Photo credits to Katie!

RTS,S is not a catchy name.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe1111777

What uppppp a big paper was published today on the RTS,S vaccine, the most efficacious malaria vaccine to date, which is currently in Phase 3 clinical trials (the last phase before it can be put on the market). It's weird though that they were like "O HAY we finished 1 year of our clinical trial and we are too excited to wait to publish so we are gonna publish nowwwwwww and then publish the rest later!" That is not standard practice, just showing a snapshot in time of a larger trial. But I guess NEJM thought it was important enough to put it out there. I think we're a long way from what we want in terms of a malaria vaccine, but it's a step in the right direction, and we'll learn a lot by looking at how (and for how long) people respond (or don't) to the vaccine immunologically. EXCITING MALARIA TIMES

In other news, our house is gonna get a GOAT and a GARDEN and I might eventually get furniture!! We are gonna call the goat Katie Lucy Briggs because someone told us we had to name it after ourselves, but we wanted to name it Lucy and thought it was weird to name a pet after us. So we compromised. We are going to make goat cheese. We would actually like the goat cheese-making to be a sustainable enterprise, so if you have any advice about goat farming, hit me up.

Here Katie is teaching Feena the gee-tar.

Feena gets bored of the guitar but not of the camera.


Last night we made spaghetti alla carbonara!! It was soooo tasty, and much needed after so much rice and beans. We even had portobello mushrooms and asparagus as sides! (Ok, I usually don't eat those things, but I am eating them here.)


Of course I do prefer wine and cheese! Katie brought a cheese feast back from Kampala. Then the electricity went out for almost 48 hours, sooo.....we had to eat it ALL.

Tonight Katie did a photoshoot of the kids wearing two of my hats. It was just about the cutest thing ever. I only have these two shots - the rest are on her super nice camera.


More to come!

on Cadbury eclairs

I really don't like Cadbury chocolate. It's all milk and I can barely taste the chocolate. But when I was in Kenya in 2006, I found something they made that I really liked: caramels with milk chocolate inside!!

But I had forgotten what they were called, and all I remembered is that they were delicious and caramel-ly. I was looking all over for them (in both Uganda and SA) and not having any luck and was sooooo sad.

But then we were in the supermarket in Tororo last week and I found a whole bag!! Glorious. Turns out Katie has a love of them too, developed separately from mine, so HOORAY. Now our house has two glorious bags of eclairs. Life is good.

Too bad you can't eat in the lab.

F-A-I-L

F - Forgetting. I forgot so much stuff in South Africa. How?? Not only the things I listed on facebook (shoes, jacket), but a shirt and some earrings as well. I could kick myself for being so dumb.

A - Assays (well, really, cultures) that I started earlier this week are probably totally kaput. They've been at a temperature range from 31 to 41, and that is NOT GOOD. They are also probably completely contaminated by now, since they've been moved around and we keep opening the incubator door. maybe A is just for ARGH. Also yesterday when we couldn't start any cultures? I would have had 4 samples! 4! A full plate! ARGH.

I - Incubator failure. xTWO. This is disastrous for the immunology lab, not just for my project but for all of the major projects. A technician is coming tomorrow...I'm crossing my fingers.

L- Library. IE, my Kindle bit the dust, completely at random. Maybe I'm overly reliant on technology, but this one really hurts. All my books are on there! Scientific articles! NEJM! I was 34% of the way through Les Mis! I know I can read on my computer, but the screen attracts bugs, hurts my eyes, and my battery life is crappy enough that not having constant power at the house for charging is a problem.

The not-so-FAIL:

1) We have a chicken named Edna. For eggs. Katie and I want to get a pregnant goat for milk so we can make goat cheese!! Here Katie is attempting to push the chicken off the sink with a large knife (not the sharp side):


2) Started running this week. Yay? We'll see how long it lasts.
3) Started watching Mad Men as a house this week. I was already at ep 9 so I'm anxious to get back to that point and start seeing new ones.
4) Have some good skype dates set up for tomorrow
5) Beth is going to be able to get my jacket and shirt from Alex in Mbarara on Monday!
6) I do enjoy having Feena and Hope around. Here, a cute picture of Feena with Jess' umbrella for your amusement.

laboratory problemos

We got back to Tororo on Monday after spending literally all day Sunday flying, crashing in Kampala overnight, and taking a 5 1/2 hour bus ride back to Tororo (...it usually takes 4 hours). When we got back, the incubator was broken! Oh nos! This is problematic, since pretty much everything immunology does requires an incubator. Anyway, we were able to hook up the CO2 to the other incubator, but when we did that we had trouble getting air out of the sample port to check the C02 level. Finally, frustrated, we just shoved a wire through the port, and...mouse poop came out?? WTF!? It could have been a rust ball, I guess, except that when we opened the top of the incubator we found other mouse poops. Gross. Anyway 1 of 2 incubators is now working and we'll be trying to get the other one serviced soon....somehow.

Incubator troubleshooting w Katie and Wamala.

A few other pictures of the lab.

Our flow cytometer! Also not really working =(.

The immunology team! Being silly and wearing eye/face protection. Ijay and Pras are based in SF but were here for the conference two weeks ago and this is the picture we took to put at the end of a presentation.

More work stories to come. I just started my first cultured Elispot yesterday, so we'll see how this goes...

last night in Durban =( (or, Doris forever)

That's probably my favorite picture from the night. Really captures the mood.

Doris men really know how to cook. The grilled fare was amaaaazing.

MEAT. Yes that's a whole chicken you see. Lots of my pictures after this are smoky because the smoke got everywhereee.

Devesh doesn't eat meat, so he made himself a butternut squash puree, and then promptly ate it straight out of the blender.

Bonfire times!!

This was also, unfortunately, the night of our worst lost to OU in the history of the rivalry. LOOK AT THE BETRYAL BEHIND ME! We are no longer friends, Jon Powell & Sarah Puryear.

Anyway, for a group of people that I technically don't know very well, I feel that we make an awesome crew, maybe even a karass, if you will. Minus Sarah and Jon, of course. One of the best things about this program thus far has been the chance to meet many other students that are interested in the same problems that I am and are also excited about new and innovative solutions - I can't wait to grow up and be collegues with this awesome bunch of folks.

Durban part 1

For those of you who don't know, the whole reason Jess and I got to go to South Africa in the first place is because we were going to a medical conference in Durban on Oct 6-7 called AWACC - AIDS, or Annual Workshop in Advanced Clinical Care - AIDS. So Doris Duke (Harvard) graciously funded us to go to Durban to attend this conference, and we expanded the trip to a week because it only cost 200$ more to add on Cape Town. And we (the Doris Duke CRFs) also capitalized on the experience by renting a beach house to stay in and a party bus to travel in. Doris does like to travel in style. Reminder: we had all only met each other for 2 weeks in Bethesda. Somehow, it all worked out. I promise to post about the conference itself later, but for now, here are the pictures of the weekend:

The first crew arrives in Durban! Party bus obtained! Alex experiences hemineglect while driving and we all pray and wear our seatbelts. Haha no, but Alex did an awesome job and we only had one extremely frightening car experience which involved going backwards down our extremely steep beach house driveway.

The gang's all here! Except Chemtai, who had visa problems. So sad! We missed you!

The view from Crannogs Cottage's porch, ie, where we had breakfast every morning.

At a bar called Badgers where the waitress did not understand a word we said, despite the fact that we were all using English. South African accents can be hilariously hard to understand, and apparently they feel the same way about the American accent.

Side spoon is necessary when you are 4 to a bench seat.

On Friday night, we went out in Durban and had a BLAST. We ate a giant pizza, I had a margarita with cayenne in it at a place called Taco Zulu, we ran into a bachelor party that paid for tons of drinks, and then ended the night at a reggae bar called Cool Runnings. Obviously it was perfect.

And somehow we ended up staying out until 5am. We got back to the house at 6am and watched the sun rise. Unfortunately, it was a little cloudy - could've been prettier!

Sarah and I were unable to sleep for long when we woke up on Saturday and saw that the weather had changed into perfect beautifulness. So we had a beach day!

This is a bunny chow - a famous Durban specialty. It's just curry in a hollowed out hunk of bread. Pretty tasty!

There were these natural rock pools along the beach that were beauuuutiful, and perfect for swimming since they were shallow and a bit warmer. They were especially pretty when the waves would hit the side and splash up.

And then that last night, Saturday night, we had a big bbq (or braai) and bonfire on the beach! It was so fun that it deserves its own post.