Colleen M Easton

Last night PBS Wide Angle showed a documentary about the midwife training program in Mozambique.  Mozambique is a country in Africa which along with many other war and poverty stricken places suffers severly from a high maternal death rate. 

Mozambique has implemented a training program which allows midwifes to go through an intensive training in obsteric surgery.  In a country with an alarming shortage of doctors the training program gives midwives the ability to save mothers and babies during labor by giving the training they need to safely perform emergency surgeries such as c-sections and hysterectomies.   The program has so far enabled Mozambique to dramatically reduce their maternal mortality rate

I think that being a midwife would be a beautful and wonderful profession. This documentary “Birth of a Surgeon” follows one young girl through the training process and shows the many diffuclt decisions she is faced with.  It also has very powerful footage of the wonders and tragedies of childbirth.

Some pictures taken on my daily trek from Rochester to Henrietta

Last weekend my dad and I went to see the new movie Mongol at the Little Theatre in Rochester.  Mongol is about Ghangis Khan’s rise to power.  The film is in Mongolian with English subtitles.  I don’t believe I have ever heard Mongolian before, it is a very exotic and fierce sounding language.  The sound of Mongolian and the spectalular Mongolian scenery (the movie was actually filmed in Mongolia) were my favorite parts of the movie.  The story was exciting  but would have been more exciting and interesting if it had told more about the process and stragtegies used to overcome obstacles rather than just showing the spectaclular outcomes.  I also really liked the love story between Ghengis Khan and his bride Borte.

These photos as well as the one below are from my first roll of film with this camers.  I had them developed by the Kodak photo lab in Schenectady.

The Biology department at Union often has guests speakers give seminars during the common lunch hour.  Today’s speaker was a professor at the University of Rhode Island, who does research work in Tanzania.  Tanzania is a small country on the coast of East Africa, struggling with many issues relating to their severe poverty. 

The speaker and her colleagues are working on a livelihood project in Tanzania.  They started a conservation project on the coastal villages.  The primary source of revenue from these villages comes from fishing and gathering other organisms for sale from the water.  The result has been overcultivation and thus declining profits.  The research team worked with the communities to establish ‘no-take’ zones.  These zones work to maintain water quality and biodiversity of the entire area.  Also due to over spill they increase the fish populations and other crop populatiions of the fishing areas.  The communities themselves were very involved in the decision making behind this effort and are repsonsible for enforcement. 

Many women of these communites gather conkles, a type of oyster, from the shallow waters.  They are able to sell these and bring in an income to their famiiles.  However they also ran into an overcultivation problem.  The researchers taught these women how to farm and cultivate a different type of oyster and harvest half-pearls.  The half pearls are used to make jewlery, which can also be sold for increased income.  The half-pearl project is especially interesting because a major benefit is that it gives these women a chance to educate themselves and empower themselves.  As in many impoverished areas the women are underrepresented in government and community decision making.  They are also often uneducated and treated as subordinate to men. 

The goal of the the project is to help the community improve their environment and some quality of life issues by involving and educating them on the roots of some of the problems and possible solutions

Over my spring break I read The Virgin Suicides  by Jeffrey Eugenides.  I become completely absorbed in the book and the characters very quickly and loved the experience of reading it.  Eugenides dealt with the issue of suicide in a very unique way, the tone was more melancholy and mysterious than extreme sadness and anguish.  

 The Virgin Suicides was beautiful, mysterious and romantic, all qualities that I greatly enjoy.  I especially loved the language style used; it created very vivid images and emotions.  Due to the language the characters had depth and truth but were also removed from reality in a haunting way.  One of my favorite quotes from The Virgin Suicides is how Lux Lisbon is described by one of her many lovers,

“..the most naked person with clothes on he had ever seen.”

I have recently started reading Middlesex, another novel by Jeffrey Eugenides.  I have not been nearly as absorbed in Middlesex and may postpone reading it until the summer when I have devote more concentration to it. I  have been instructed to wait a while before watching the film of The Virgin Suicides, as it is apparently not as good as the book.  I do hope to watch it at some point though.

Today it snowed alot in Rochester.  I borrowed my mom’s digital camera for the afternoon and walked through highland park, which was quiet and pretty in the snow.  The first picture is of my favorite tree.

I just finished reading Shopgirl  by Steve Martin.  I really enojoyed reading it.  I found Shopgirl to be well written and candid.  Martin creates an honest and accurate portrait of a shy woman.  Shyness is often misrepresented in books.

I also found to relationship between Mr. Ray Porter and Mirabelle to be fasicanting and fun to read to about.  I did however, disagree with the way Martin seems to equate self actualization with being in love.  I see these as two entirely different processes and I believe that either one can be accomplished without the other.

I had a lot of fun reading this book and I think I would like to see the movie soon.

I took this photo of Devin using his camera.