Day Twenty-Four

Our plans for today ended up changing a little. We had originally planned on going to the local CDC office here in Lingao, however, the developer (Andy Chan) called last night to inform us that the provincial news would be sending a crew to interview the USC group leaders and to get video of us working. The news crew's main objective was to put together a report for the Hainan Evening News program. I got some pictures of them interviewing our instructor and I'm pretty sure there will be some footage and pictures of our group working in the provincial news and local newspaper.

After our meeting with the news crew everyone skurried to their rooms to do some work. I did some reading and then went back down to the conference room for lunch with the other students. After lunch we had about an hour to kill before our rescheduled trip to visit the Lingao CDC office.

The CDC office here in Lingao is quite primitive compared to the office buildings in Chengdu and Beijing. The office here was part of a complex built adjacent to the town hospital ( the other CDCs each had their own newly built office buildings with laboratories, isolation units, and other departments). The main focus of the CDC here is to ensure child immunization. Their secondary priority to be ready to act in the event of an epidemic. Lingao has become relatively healthy over the last twenty years. In the past its biggest problem was tuberculosis and hepatitis. Recently, with the use of anti-TB medications and Hep B vacinations, both of these diseases have been nearly eradicated in the town. At the end of our short discussion we took a picture with the CDC directors and gave them some small gifts.

Tonight will be our last night in the city of Lingao. Tomorrow we wiil leave here to go back to Haikou. From Haikou the rest of the group will leave to come back home. I, on the other hand, just made reservations for a hotel in Sanya, Hainan, located on the south side of the island, and I'll be staying there until July 2nd, ( I'll probably just read, exercise, and do some school work). On July 2nd I'll come back up to Haikou and on the 3rd I'll leave from the Haikou airport to go to Shanghai. Alright, hope everything is good back home!