This week has been fairly good at my internship. I am still so stressed that I will not finish everything on time. Today I actually saw two patients in the ICU that are on ventilators and now have pneumonia. It is easier to get the information that I need for the study since I can ask the Sister (a.k.a. nurse) the question. Retrospective research is hard because not all of the answers you need were written down. It was sad seeing the children that were really sick. Apparently, one burn victim died of pneumonia over the weekend. Although it is really sad, it gives me that much more motivation to continue to do what I am doing and to finish this project, in the hopes that it will shed some light on something.

Besides that, I saw 27 dresses this week. Cute movie. I also bought a really cute dress that I am going to wear to the Valentine Day's Dance tomorrow at UWC (university of western cape where two people in my house intern). We are exchanging secret valentine gifts tomorrow so that should be interesting. Right now I am not sounding overly enthusiastic since I am pretty discouraged. We have to do this activist project for the women's study class and I decided that I was going to focus my efforts for my activist project on the after-school program in Khayelitsha that we visited on Saturday. When people ask me what I am doing and I mention that, they give me this attitude. I feel like a horrible person because they stated that we were all just doing that for fun and here I am asking for credit. Does this make me a horrible person? I was thinking about doing this before we even went and before everybody had such a good time. I figured that I would take a different angle, besides being a mentor to the kids, by trying to fundraise in order to get money for the program. They cannot do any fundraising for themselves because they need certain things in order to start fundraising. First off, they need t-shirts in order for the soccer team to be able to compete against other teams in Khayelitsha. They also need traditional clothes in order to be able to perform at places like the waterfront where donations are given to performers. People are still giving me crap about all of this. Then to make matters worse, apparently it is really hard to try to fundraise. I wanted to try to see if I could coordinate something with some people at Uconn in order to raise money for them but everywhere I go, people keep shooting me down. Way to keep my confidence boosted! :)

Also, although I have been told that Uconn and UMD want to interview me for the PhD programs, UMD has not gotten back to me about whether or not I can have a phone interview. Uconn has told me that I can have a phone interview (about a month ago) but still have not emailed me about the date or time. I did not get into the NIH program and I have not heard back from Emory, Columbia, Georgetown or John Hopkins. Although I love it here, I feel like I am compromising my future. I have worked so hard to get where I am and will being here prevent me from getting achieving it?