I've gotten good at building redundancy into my projects (and my bikes). The projects don't fall over. I'm not very good at building redundancy into myself and so the project succeeds at my expense. This last 12 months since I started my PhD has been an exercise in expending all redundancy. From early last year I have been working in intensive 2-to 3-month bursts to scramble, get to a conference, catch up, scramble, travel again, scramble...fly... scramble... work... scramble... catch up... and scramble. Its true that you can do more with a team. Except when the team don't play the game then you just end up with multiple broken projects and it is my personal redundancy that is spent. Ever optimistic, you think that the next 3-month burst will be different that it will be the last but when you end up at the end of nearly 12-months with spaces of just a few days in-between each burst and then you become empty. You can feel the cortisol petering out, the adrenaline is finished, and its like being in the last hour of a 7 hour bike ride in 35 degree heat, that feeling of chills and shivers except it lasts for days at a time. It can cripple you if you let it. I won't let it. And I won't continue like this.
So quick update on the main projects as they stand:
Cambodia Smile (PhD project) - the children are now over 1-year of age and we have some challenges with recalls that we are working through but initial findings around improving oral hygiene habits are encouraging. There has been alot of progress in terms of recognizing the issue of early childhood caries at ministry of health level both in Cambodia and in our neighboring countries. That means that there is now a higher chance that oral health will be integrated with maternal-child care in Cambodia in the future.
Seal Cambodia - we have 2000 of 60,000 children left to 'seal' and we are in the process of doing follow-up on two different cohorts; a three-year cohort and a one-year cohort. Some challenges with finding children as they change schools, schools go bankrupt or they just change their name. The dental students from my university have been working hard to track them down and hopefully we'll get an acceptable recall rate.
Healthy Kids - This the new generation of Seal Cambodia. It works on the premise that we shouldn't be doing stuff to kids until we have worked with their social and physical landscape. We want to create a social and physical environment in which it is easy for healthy activities to occur. We are in the process of tying up a project agreement with the school health department. Right now the program covers 30000 kids and we are building a data base that can track participation. By this time next year we expect that 10,000 children will be covered. At the moment we are working with a bit of a set back because Colgate Cambodia don't want to sell us tooth brushes at wholesale price anymore and so that almost doubles the cost of the intervention. We are trying to negotiate again and are looking for other providers. Effectively we will buying 20,000 tooth brushes with tooth paste to match so surely we should be in a good position to buy!
We're getting there team... just keep sending those positive thoughts!!
