The top picture is of a third grade class taking their iron tablets.

The second picture, of my favorite escuelita thus far, Alto Cochabamba, is true to its name. The city of Cochabamba is relatively flat, but climbing out of the valley onto the mountain are the poorer areas, yet all the more beautiful views. This little school sits on top of a hill and the neighborhood it serves is the poorest I have seen here thus far. As I wiped out my camera to take some pictures (I have officially become the program photographer) of Sibia explaining a few details to the Principal, students flooded the office and crowded the desk wanting to be in the picture. Since the view from their little school is so amazing, I convinced them to take the picture party outside.

Next week we begin the first round of the evaluation of the program here in Cochabamba. While I love visiting the schools and health departments and I learn immensely from doing so, my actual contribution to the program is within the evaluation. Baseline data (prevalence of anemia, giardia, parasites, ability to concentrate, etc) was collected on 10 schools with the program and 10 schools without the program before the children recieved any Vitamin A or iron. Now, three months later we will see if the program has made a difference in the schools with the intervention.

This week I have been preparing graphs for a meeting held today with members of Board of Education and Board of Health here in Cochabamba (the program is centered around and dependent upon the collaboration of such national entities). As much as I cursed Stata this year, I would have done anything to have had it this week. The data was in excell and it is just not capable of all those fun tricks. However, we will be using a statiscal software for this coming round of data collection. Ojala it will be one I am relatively familiar!