It's been a while ...

Happy belated Fourth to all of you! I was happy and surprised to receive a call from one of my former ISU roommates, Alissa, and her husband Jon the night before the 4th ... they had decided to drive up from Newport News for the day to take in the DC celebration! We had fun at the Air and Space Museum and at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the Mall ... but while we were there we got evacuated to the Natural History Museum because tornadoes had been spotted nearby in Maryland. The museum was a rather bizarre scene ... families were sleeping underneath the dinosaur models and cracking open their picnic baskets. After two hours, they let us back on to the Mall, and three of us and my friend Toby camped out near the Washington Monument to take in the fireworks --- a fantastic display! I took about 175 shots of the fireworks, as I'm trying to learn how to best take shots at night ... a frustrating but fun process!

All of last week, I was privileged to attend an AMSA conference for medical and dental students at UCSF in San Francisco; the theme centered around primary care and community-based collaborations between academic and disenfranchised communities. I took part in sessions on geriatric care, domestic violence, health care disparities, and surgery and public health. I also toured the San Quentin prison, the only male prison in CA that houses condemned, or death row, prisoners (It is the prison where Scott Petersen is being held.). We visited with a prisoner who himself is a peer health educator and saw their medical and dental facilities. My trip there was perhaps the five most meaningful hours I've spent in a long time ... such a range of social issues that implicate themselves in a correctional health career, something I have never thought much about before. The physicians that led our tour indicated that they care not to know what these men have done before entering San Quentin ... they are, after all, human beings and patients in need of health care and support. And so many of these men, it seems to me, were born into such circumstances that the rest of us could never even imagine, and it leaves me with much to think about in terms of proper and adequate punishment and rehabilitation, decisions our society has made about criminalizing certain behaviors, and the role that racial, ethnic, and class discrimination plays in many of these issues. It's sobering to consider all these problems at the same time.

While in CA, I also had the opportunity to walk among some redwoods with my dear friends John and Pearl (with whom I lived when I did AmeriCorps), see my friends Kim and Carrie, meet up with the Donats, and visit with my Brazilian professor Wal and her son, Sam. Such a great time! I do believe I'm going to have to add San Francisco to my list of 'residency cities'!