Week 6: Wrapping up at NCAIDS with a Panda Joke

By Yuqian Liu 

A panda story is always a cute one! It goes like this: A panda walks into a fancy restaurant and orders a super expensive dish. After he finishes eating his food, he takes out his pistol and shoots the waiter and then leaves. The owner of the restaurant is very confused, so he goes to the panda bear and asks for an explanation. The panda gave him a very arrogant look and says: check the dictionary, you stupid XXX! The restaurant owner picks up a dictionary and finds the definition for "Panda": Panda is a kind of bear that eats shoots and leaves! Of course this was the best panda joke I ever heard.  This joke of my supervisor's put my internship at NCAIDS an official end. I guess I am the panda then, except that I did not eat shoots and leaves. Instead, I spent my last week working like crazy: online research, interviews with local CDC staff members,  interview transcription, meetings attended by high governmental officials, and rapport bulding with my own potential research participants. In-office work can get a little tedious sometimes, so I highly appreciate the opportunities of going to local sites and hear about the CDC people who work at the front line of disease control.

6 weeks of immersing into the high governmental policy making division and engaging in field activities at local level CDCs has given me a general idea of how disease control works. It is not all about top-down policy making or anything like that, success is made is when both the society and people work together. Discrimination, prejudice or even a little bias can affect the results of intervention and care. One of the interview participants was a MSM and the director of a local NGO that works with MSM and HIV infected people. According to him, grassroot NGOs sometimes work better than the governmental CDCs because they can approach the people more easily. I do agree with him given my former experience working with local NGOs on other types of grassroot development projects. Well, it is time to leave NCAIDS' office and spend time with my research participants who are MSM. - Yuqian Liu