First presentation!

But first, because of yesterday's transgression with the ants and the flame, I decided to feed them this morning with a slice of skin from my mango that still had a little meat on it.

I wondered why so few seemed interested.  Then I realized that it was because they were already full.

There was a second cockroach posed to serve as guard dog, and this is what became of him:

Sad day to be a cockroach around my place here.

This afternoon, I had my first presentation at an actual hospital we are trying to work with.  My purpose in the Philippines is to present the project to hospitals we had not yet met with, or reestablish relationships with those we had, in order to try to see if it is possible or desirable to them to be one of the sites in the study from which we would harvest samples of the placentas from the woman that have been part of a much larger cohort since 1983, when their mothers were pregnant with them.  It's a pretty fascinating project.  Upon agreeing to participate, I am then to return to the hospitals to begin training whatever staff they think could take the samples in how to do it.  So, my first meeting with any of the hospitals was with the one that is expected to have the highest number of women from our study deliver. 

(Look!  She's presenting!  hahahaha)

This was at a really busy hospital in Cebu.  It was much different than hospitals in the United States.  Firstly, the nurses dress in 1950s nurse garb:

 They wear the hats!!!  I was reading up on those things, and it seems like there is a really interesting cultural history for those hats in nursing.  I skimmed it here (and there are even more awesome vintage pictures of nurses.  hum-in-a-hum-in-a).  The residents all had fancy dresses and tall shoes on (one was wearing a dress I wanted to get from Plains and Prints!).

After the presentation, they gave us a tour so I could determine whether or not they had an appropriate space we could use to set up shop.  The hospital is overcrowded, and it was a little startling.  This is what the room where the ladies go after they deliver looks like:

Lots of different groups of people everywhere in close proximity to one another.  

In the labor room, which is a giant open room with a lot of beds, there are 3 women to a bed.  There are 2 women per bed in the delivery room. The labor room looks something like this:

So, we went through all these halls.  There were small sections of tinted windows, which is where the women with insurance get to deliver (in privacy) and where little babies in incubators hang out.  The resident took us down to the delivery area to see if we could use the space.  There were women delivering babies.  !!!  That was sort of crazy to be around.  She took us into a room off the main hallway where they usually go to dispose of the placentas.  There were a couple of hospital beds with stirrups.  It's the "repair room."  I still cringe a little.  "Don't worry," she tells me.  They have a small privacy curtain in case there were to be a woman in their getting her baby shoot sewn back together.  I am curious to see how I handle all this when it comes time to actually work with a fresh one delivered in the hospital.