Gratitude and Education, All Rolled Into One

The only small class I have is our Epidemiology/Biostat seminar. It's a mandatory class for everyone in our program, all 24 of us. The first couple of weeks it just annoyed me, to be honest.

For one, I have always loathed group work in the service of education. I know it's *good* for me, but I hate working with people who are sloppy, lazy, slower than me, faster than me, less (or more) creative than me. In short, I like to work with my best friend, me, and we're a tight couple. For another, there were no papers or tests (things at which I excel), but instead an ill-defined "project." Done, of course, with the aforementioned group.

We were, on the first day, divided into groups and then sub-groups. My sub-group is Thomas and me. Thomas is nothing like me. He is slightly more than half my age, extremely single and unencumbered, never forgets to bring things like the paperwork or the tape measure to the field assignment, and doesn't drive. Thomas, of course, annoyed me for the first couple of trips we had to make, and I know I annoyed him terribly. But I think we've grown on each other. We spent 2 hours together Thursday evening, and I honestly enjoyed myself, and learned a lot about him and his life. He found out some things about my life, and acted generally interested. He even helped me step up our pace so I could go pick Joe up from guitar, even though we both acknowledged that Joe could walk home (no, Thomas and Joe have never met).

What were we doing? Well, there's the truly amazing thing. We were working on the annoying project. Except that now, I adore this project.

We are working for the city of Berkeley's public health department (one of only two non-county level PH departments in the state) to help them figure out two things: one is the "walkability" of their neighborhoods relative to each other, and the other is augmenting their understanding of the disparity in low birth weight rates across neighborhoods. It's a huge disparity, one of the biggest in the nation, and to date it has not been explained despite numerous studies and interventions.

Today we looked at and photographed two middle class Berkeley neighborhoods. One on one end of the middle class spectrum, the other on the other. And we learned that these neighborhoods had more in common than they had differences. Both with mostly single family homes, some retail, a school. Both with a mix of niced-up houses and run down houses. Both with people out on the streets at dinner time. And yet in one I felt totally comfortable walking around even on very quiet streets, and in the other I had my guard up and a hand on my camera at all times. You may perhaps be able to guess which one has the high rate of low birth weight.

So I'm thinking a lot about what it's like to live someplace a little scary, and stress, and population density and its effect on people, and what it's like to hear gun fire at night up close, instead of in the distance. And I'm really grateful that I got the winning ticket in that lottery.