Arrival in Matlab

To continue where I left off, when I woke up this morning I was feeling well enough to travel to Matlab. Matlab is an area in Bangladesh a couple hours from Dhaka in the Chittigong region. The ICDDR,B who we have been working with runs a hospital in Matlab, and conducts a great deal of research in the surrounding towns. We left at about 6:30am to try and avoid traffic as much as we could. There was still quite a bit, and an area of the city we had to get through that was filled with giant buses which was kind of frightening with our car dwarfed by them, but our driver was excellent and managed to get us through.

Much of the drive on the highway was pretty uneventful. The road we used for the first half of the trip was crowded, but it was well maintained. There were a couple large bridges to drive over that offered great views of the rivers we were crossing. After crossing a couple of these, it was time to turn off of the highway onto back country roads. There used to be a better road to Matlab however it was destroyed by the Monsoons over the past few years to a point where it is no longer viable. The route instead was drivable, but the roads were very small. There was hardly enough room for our car to fit, and the road snaked along a slight drop of a couple meters into water, which we did not want to fall into. There were several times when it did not seem like we were going to fit, but our driver continued to be great and was able to navigate the roads well, even though he had not driven them in the past.

The drive was different in that we were able to take in some of the sights. We were driving through rural areas and saw large farms, and many people living a different kind of lifestyle than the city. The further we went the more blue we were also able to see in the sky. We cannot see much, but when in Dhaka it is always a perpetual grey due to large amounts of pollution in the atmosphere. Any sky that was able to peak through that was certainly an improvement.

After snaking through these tiny roads for about an hour, we eventually got to a river we needed to cross on a ferry. We waited about 20 minutes for the ferry to arrive, which we were able to drive onto in order to cross. After it brought us across the river, we were finally in Matlab. It was about another 10 minute drive before we arrived at the ICDDR,B campus.

The facility they have here is pretty incredible. We are staying in their guest house which is often used by international research teams. Maia and Kate are splitting a room while I have my own room. They are air-conditioned, and the beds are quite comfortable. It is almost like staying in a hotel. The food is standard Bangladeshi (rice, veggies, assorted meat) but it is delicious here and there is plenty of it. The only drawback is that the rooms don’t have internet. Instead we have to use public computers which will fast, are just a little inconvenient.

After arriving, Maia and Kate took a walk around the campus while I took a quick nap. Then after lunch we went to go and meet with one of the doctors who works at the ICDDR,B. He introduced us to the director of Demographic and Health data here. They were both interested in our project, and offered to help us over the next couple days while we are here. After meeting with both of them, we went with the Demographic data director upstairs to his office where he described to us the program they have here. It is really quite incredible. For the population of around 100,000 within the reach of the ICDDR,B in Matlab, they have up to date health and census data uninterrupted dating back to the 70s. To demonstrate this, he showed us a number of census books over the span of about 30 years and we were able to track one person all the way through. His department has around 40 health workers that collect health and demographic data from every single household in Matlab every 2 months without fail. There are a number of other researchers who are also doing work on side projects across these populations. The health workers collect all of their data on PDAs so the ICDDR,B understands that mobile technology has a ton of potential for this kind of work. They also have extensive GIS mapping of all of Matlab which will be incredibly useful to the first phase of our project- where we hope to use already existing data to create some sort of visualization about the spread of cholera.

After finishing that meeting, we were given tours of the maternity wards of the hospital, as well as the diarrheal disease wards. They use completely up to date procedures, and can perform pretty advanced operations here. The hospital is quite large, clean, and beautiful, and seems to run with great efficiency. They have offered to give us all of the clinical and demographic data that they have, which we can use along with the GIS data to create our visualization. We are quite excited to get to work on it now that all the data is almost in our hands.

We’re not sure how long we are going to remain in Matlab. Tomorrow we are going on more tours of the facility to places like the labs, and they are also going to give us a tour of the research sites in the field so we can get a better idea of where the data is coming from. Matlab has been great to us so far, and I am looking forward to what we will do next.

Also, on a related note, currently the project that I’m working on here is in a competition on a website to raise at least $4,000 from at least 50 different donors in one month. We are well on our way towards reaching that goal, but we need all the help we can get! If you think you can spare even $10-15, it could go a long way towards helping with our project! Just go to: http://www.globalgiving.org/projects/mapping-cholera-in-bangladesh/