We awake to a phone call requesting a meeting.

After a night of celebrating Susie's birthday (two months late) we had a hard time getting up today. Thank goodness for hangover prophylaxis, but still none of us were in perfect form this morning.

We had planned on doing some errands and having one meeting at 5pm and so weren't too worried about waking up at a certain time, but we woke to a phone call at 8:30 from a collaborator asking if we could meet for lunch. And so we pried Nick from his bed (Nick is always the last one up) and rushed to leave the house in order to accomplish our tasks and make it for our 1pm meeting 45 minutes outside of Quito.

Anat drove Susie's parents car out to the meeting and did surprisingly well navigating the crazy Quito roads and drivers (Susie was a bit concerned).

After a 15 min meeting we have 3 hours to kill before our next meeting, which is why we are blogging now.

-Susie

At work at the lovely Casa de Welty's

We met KL (UC Berkeley) and Prof. JE (Univ. of Michigan) at the cafeteria of Universidad de San Francisco de Quito. The University is a relatively new campus, and has some very nice features, quadrangles and common spaces. JE's project has collaborators in this campus, and we came in the middle of their annual Congresso in which the American project collaborators and Ecuadorian ones meet. The project is mostly centered around the impact that new roads to the remote regions of Ecuador have had on village life in the mostly indigenously populated north western county of the country (Esmaraldas). The field team usually stays in Borbon and visits villages up river. We asked to be included in this year's trip in order to visit with some of the field nurses and health promotion personel. We are very grateful that they allowed us to access their contacts.

JE introduced us to the Ecuador based field director, WS. WS discussed some of the details of our Borbon trip with Susie. We determined that we will be leaving for Borbon on the 15th, spend one day in Borbon, one in Zapayo Grande and one in Colonosoi. We will return on either the 18th or 19th depending on our mode of transportation.

We were also introduced to one of the micro biologists working at the univesity laboratories- C-. She gave us a tour of the lab in which they have PCR, ELISA, gel electrophoresis machines. Here they also store and analyze specimen collected from the field in Esmeraldas.

Later in the afternoon we met with a professor  who works on diagnostics at the university. He was our first interviewee, and the interview went swimmingly well. This professor was particularly infomative about price-points for our device and about possible ways of introducing the device to the Ecuadorian market.

-Anat.