Moving Along

I have had a much busier week here. I spoke with the director and she gave me an overview of the summer. They are going to spend much of the summer putting together all the data gathered from outreach work and the research study in order to prepare to start writing grant proposals and renewals in the following months. I will thus be involved in both helping sort and sum up data and in writing and editing some of the proposals and interest letters as many of these need to be written in English.

This week, I began to organize and sort much of their outreach work data. Each night when they go out to do outreach work, they record the nature of the contact with the client and the issues discussed, if any.

The forms are supposed to be filled out in a specific manner so that it is easy to see what was given out on each night and I was supposed to sum up everything for each night and then record the number of clients seen, resources given out, etc. for each month. I spent much of this week trying to organize all this data. I filled out missing forms to the best of my ability and tried to re-write the outreach work data in a more cohesive manner. I worked with a member of the staff, who has been doing outreach work for the longest time so he was able to help me sort through the paperwork. I have been able to get through a lot of it and have May and June left for next week. As I really like to organize things, this was a fun project for me. I definitely could see ways in which cooperation and guidelines on uniformly could really help make the process more efficient. This is something I would really like to help out with and it is something I believe will be very helpful in the future so we do not have to spend as much time later sorting through data. Also, I am thinking of ways in which we could make more of it computerized sooner.

In general, I want to get more involved with the outreach work as I feel I can contribute in that area and it is very interesting to go out at night and meet the clients and get to hear their stories. In speaking with the team, there are two other aspects of the outreach work that need improvement and in which I would like to get involved. One is that now they are starting to be spread out too much throughout Podgorica as they know more of their clients and where they live and each client expects them to come to their apartment or house to deliver the clean needles and other materials. Because of this, they have to do a lot of driving and are starting to find that they do not have time to visit everyone. Therefore, they want to try and institute several central areas as meeting places and have a set schedule of when they come to each place.

I am excited about getting involved in all these aspects of the outreach work and I will start this next week. My main goal for next week is to finish organizing the paper work and to have the final summed data ready. I want to go out for the outreach work as much as possible and to start working with the outreach team on alleviating some of these issues. They are also saying that it is supposed to cool down a bit here next week so I am excited about that. I have found a path home that has a lot of shade so the walk to work and back is not that bad. I am really looking forward to the following week!