Update

Hello again! We haven't written an update since we left Kabul and we apologize. The holidays are unkind to us residents and there was much to catch up on after weeks of absence.

That is not to say that we haven't been working on our project. What time we had to ourselves in the past few weeks we have spent organizing the data we collected into specific groups based on hospitals and types of responders (i.e. physician, nurse, etc.). The entire pool of data is currently under translation back to English so that it can be analyzed. The staff at Mclaren Regional Medical Center in Flint, Michigan will be instrumental in this process. Specifically, we'd like to thank Dr. Ragnhild Bundesmann, Liz Mihallof, Eve Kirkwood, and Dr. Jeffery Mitchell for their help so far and for their support in the future.

Aside from that we have been attempting to build our contacts in the medical world here. Earlier in one of our blogs we had mentioned that medical residents in and around Kabul have absolutely no access to the updated medical literature. They continue to use very outdated textbooks as their primary sources. We have been attempting to contact different publishers in hopes of gaining their support to improve this situation. One very important discovery Leeda made is that the New England Journal of Medicine provides free access to their online site from most impoverished nations, including Afghanistan. There are about 40 other countries on this list. All one has to do is access their site from an IP address within one of these states and they have access to the full database minus some minor conveniences like Powerpoints and CME exams. In the coming weeks when we finalize my mailing list of Afghan residents that have internet access, we will share this excellent news.

Next week we will be in California for a conference and a fundraiser intended to raised the awareness of the Afghan plight. We hope that we will continue to build support for our work there.

Now that we are back and somewhat settled into a daily routine we will begin updating the blog at least once a week. If anyone out there has any resources they can share or would like to make any comments/suggestions, please email us without hesitation.