Journal from Africa: November 2007

Ben and Harmony's Wedding

Ben and Harmony tied the knot this week at a private game reserve (Phinda) in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. More than 50 friends and family were on hand for the event. Some arrived as early as Saturday, but most, including myself, arrived on Sunday. The wedding took place Monday afternoon in a quaint spot out in the bush. It was a beautiful Buddhist ceremony that featured Harmony's father playing the guitar.

Jeff took these pictures.

During the 4 day event, we went on several game drives. I saw many animals I have never seen before including cheetah, black and white rhino, wildebeest, nyala, bush baby, bateleur eagle, and others.

Here are some pictures taken by Ben's cousin, Simone.

Mom in Switzerland!

I was lucky enough to be invited to the Institute of Social & Preventive Medicine at the University of Bern in Switzerland to attend a short course on "Causal Inference from Observational Data" taught by Miguel Hernan from Harvard and Jonathan Sterne from the University of Bristol. The course took place during the week of Thanksgiving, and to my surprise and delight, Mom accepted my invitation to come visit me in Switzerland over the holiday. Of course, Jimmy couldn't let her go without him, so he came as well. It was both Jimmy and Mom's first time to Europe. They both had to get passports within the span of 3 weeks, and much to their chagrin, Switzerland did not even stamp their passports. We had a wonderful time. It was great to see them for the first time since January. Mom and Jimmy spent the first day recovering from the 16+ hours of travel time and the 7 hour time difference. On day two, they toured Bern with a lovely Filipino lady who lived there and happened to have the day free to show tourists her city. On day three, they took a train ride into the Alps to visit Europe's highest-altitude railway station, Jungfraujoch, which is more than 11,000 feet (2+ miles) above sea level. On day four, they went shopping in Bern. On day five (Thanksgiving in the US), we all traveled to Zurich and had a nice late lunch/early dinner. Then Mom and I spent the afternoon shopping. Zurich is a beautiful city with lots of shopping. It was a quick trip, as on day six, they flew home. I think they had a really great time and am hopeful this experience will start a trend of more traveling, possibly even to Africa and Zambia.

I don't have any pictures to post at this time, but will try to post some in the future.

Published in The Lancet

Two weeks ago, we were in JAMA. This week, we are in The Lancet. Nice couple of weeks!

Chi BH, Sinkala M, Mbewe F, Cantrell RA, Kruse G, Chintu N, Aldrovandi GM, Stringer EM, Kankasa C, Safrit JT, Stringer JS. Single-dose tenofovir and emtricitabine for reduction of viral resistance to non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor drugs in women given intrapartum nevirapine for perinatal HIV prevention: an open-label randomised trial. Lancet. 2007; 370(9601): 1698-1705.