I Love Epidemiology!

A few weeks ago, due some complicated issues, we had a switch in our Epidemiology Professor. Our new instructor, Lambert, is incredibly soft-spoken, nice, and most importantly intelligent. Ever since Lambert has taken over teaching our course, two major things have shocked me, first how much I have learned and second how interesting I find every class!

As we arrive for Epidemiology we are greeted by many familiar faces, as we use the same classroom for all of our classes. This classroom has become our home, and not surprisingly having over five hours of class in the same room multiple times a week can make the room a little tiring for us. Some days I feel that the mere sight of the light blue door makes me a little tired. Combine this experience with a professor who talks very softly, and presents using PowerPoints nearing one-hundred slides with no theme (it is literally a white background with black text, no charts, no color). All of this put together sounds like one thing: a recipe for disaster - or at least extreme sleepiness and dozing. Despite this, I find myself more awake than I have been all day (and will probably be all day) and I have started to realize that there are points where I am literally on the edge of my seat working out a problem, or just listening to how Epidemiology can be used in both Public Health and Clinical Medicine. This class is amazing! I knew I was excited for Epidemiology but I never thought I could fall in love with it this much.

On the note of Epidemiology, I have started a bit of my own Epidemiology here. It seems that quite recently there has been a small cluster of something working its way through all of us. One day there were four people incredibly sick, three stayed home. The next day, two more were sick, and even Friday more and more people were not feeling quite right! I will admit that Friday I wasn’t feeling well, but I’m pretty sure it was the chili last night – plus I don’t get sick from these pesky little pathogens (I knocked on wood – don’t worry, mom)! I hope this weekend will clear up this mess and we can all be at full strength on Monday.

A little funny story to wrap up this post about nothing but my love for Epidemiology and all puzzles that are unsolved: this past week, as we arrived for Epidemiology we were waiting for a bit then someone came into the classroom and asked if we were waiting for Prof. Nyambola, which we were. He informed us the Professor would be in shortly but was in a meeting that was running over, he then showed our class rep a text that read “Tell class rep I will be late. Americans.” Sure enough, that is how we are known around the University of Nairobi! “Americans.” I guess no matter how much Kiswahili we try to learn, there’ll always be something about us. On the upside, it makes us easy to find and we generally don’t have problems explaining to people who we are (in fact someone asked us if we were from American University, and then proceeded to joke about how we kicked him out of his classroom – oops!).