Great news!

Though I said I'd wait until after the New Year to post again, I received some excellent news from my co-workers last night that I want to share. My Dartmouth-funded research project has been approved by the Vietnamese government!


For those of you who don't know what my research is about, here's a brief description: Right now, children affected by HIV/AIDS have difficulty attending primary school in a number of districts inside Vietnam, because the parents of children currently attending school protest when the government attempts to integrate them. Yet little work has been done finding out why the parents object so much. With the help of my fantastic translators (two university students in Hanoi), we are going to try to figure out what parents' main concerns are by interviewing 60 parents in two districts of Hanoi (one urban and one rural). Now that the project has been approved by the Hanoi People's Committee, it has been sent down to the Department of Education and Training of each of the districts and pretty soon we will be able to go to three elementary schools in each to obtain lists of parents and select the households to interview. I am ecstatic that this is all coming into place! It's taken about two months to get approval, and that definitely would not have been possible without the hard work of the people at the non-governmental organization (NGO) sponsoring my work Visa and the project itself, the Institute of Population, Health, and Development (PHAD).

Also, I'm going to post pictures soon, I just need to figure out how!