Andrea Gutierrez

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Reviewing my internship

This very last post, at least regarding my internship in Barbados, will consist on what I have accomplished professionally and personally during this period, so it will be more academically relevant for my peers rather to those interested unknowing what’s happening in Barbados with childhood obesity.

 To do so I need to go back to the start of the internship to when I stablished the following learning objectives for me to be reached, and I would like to discuss to what extend I reached them;

1- Gain sufficient experience and understanding of handling qualitative and quantitative data from large scale surveys and focus groups interviews.

2- To be capable of analyze and write the responses from a study into a scientific base paper.

I have reached the first 2 learning objectives from conducting our own research-project BASES (Barbadian Adolescence School Environment Survey 2017). These 2 objectives also allowed me to put into practice the theory and all relevant information-experiences from previous modules from my university as you will see bellow in combination with the other learning objectives.

Besides putting into practice my background knowledge, I understood the work load behind conducting a project as the primary stakeholder. As well, I experienced how it is the real world when you try to organize, plan, and run such project, especially when the culture you are working in is far different from the one you are familiar with.

 3-  To be actively involved in health promotion programs.

I feel like I was not able to be so involved with health promotion campaigns a such (at least from HCC), but just by working on our project leads us to educate the adolescents and teachers regarding the sweet sugary beverages (SSB) and its linkage to obesity and NCDs. This was done in the way of the SSB workshops we did, where we highlighted the possible health consequences of their consumption. As well, by participating on a voluntary data collection regarding food labelling, it allowed me to raise awareness to the public regarding the real content of the food and its importance to identify it in the labels.

4- To actively participate and comprehend the diverse dynamics within a civil society organization for the prevention of obesity and NCDs, and the work behind developing health promotion programs.

For this last learning objective, I was not able to reach it completely - or at least not as I expected. This is because I was busy with our own project, but more than that, because the civil society we work with is small and its personal was busy all the time trying to run such organization.

Nevertheless, there were few occasions when we could assist on small tasks for HCC, such as accountancy, reviewing organizational documents, helping to prepare for a conference, among others.

 So as mentioned above, I have made use of previous modules knowledge as the purpose of the internship is for. This can be summarize as it follows:

Module 1: Intercultural competences and group dynamics; sociology of        food; the global burden of disease, concepts, right and inequalities of health; nutrient recommendations 

Module 2: Nutritional knowledge for a specific group of age; and linkage between nutrition and obesity and NCDs

Module 3: Quantitative methods, basic statistics and data presentation

Module 4: Qualitative research methods; health communication; didactics; and perspectives inhuman learning

Module 5 & 6: Food and nutrition policy; consumption and markets

Next Wednesday I will present my internship experience to my university back in Copenhagen, where I will explain everything with more detail.

I want to eternally thank HCC and Maisha Hutton for hosting us and to guide us during this professional journey. They received us with opened arms from the first moment we make contact with them and I can only say that we will keep the arms open for them.

Now I will continue with my journey back home and hope you all are traveling safety home too! Happy easter everybody! I leave you with some pictures of Barbados (not internship relevant) but just so you can get to see what a beautiful country this little island is :)

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Research project results

Last week was my last week under my internship, and if you can recall from my previous post I was caught up with a lot of work in the last days. During this week I tried to implement the research project with Mexican schools but nothing was concrete, however, on Thursday and Friday I got the opportunity to apply the “Mexicans Adolescence Environment Survey 2017” to the same size of sample as we did in Barbados. This study will allow me to make a comparison between Barbados and Mexico, since both countries have opted to implement a Sweet Sugary Beverage (SSB) tax as an intervention to decrease the prevalence of obesity and NCDs in the country. Yet, the survey-research focuses more on the overall environment the adolescents are surrounded by and how it influences their health. Nevertheless this survey can reflect how the taxes could possibly influence their consumption of SSB.

That being said, I am not on time to share the results from the Mexican research before closing up formally my internship, but it will be a project that I will bring home with me and will be delivered to HCC.

Entering data from Mexico’s survey

 I also mentioned on previous posts that I wanted to share with you the results from the “Barbadian Adolescence School Environment Survey 2017” which sadly cannot share the report with you yet BUT I can share with you the amazing infographics Maria helped with, which shows the most outstanding results.

  As you can see from the infographics, the Bajan environment and circumstances of the country (such as culture and high dependence on imported foods) have led adolescents to have certain lifestyle which is reflected on the country’s health profile. As part of our report we included the following set of recommendations which we believe are needed in order to decrease the prevalence of childhood and adolescent’s obesity and NCDs;

 - Awareness campaigns about the tap water in Barbados; clean, healthy and free

- Implement the set of recommendation on the marketing of foods and non-alcoholic beverages to children.

- Ensure data collection on body mass index-for-age of children / adolescents: include ages not currently monitored – and set national target for childhood obesity.

- Nutritional standards for meals at schools – guidelines set by Nutritional Institute Centre.

- Promote communication and community participation to raise awareness and create an enabling environment and social demand for policy action to improve diet and physical activity.

- Food education; practical skills, make food preparation classes more available for classes, food literacy.

 Welcoming this set of recommendations is completely up to HCC or any other  interested body. I am happy knowing that our research will help HCC to fight the ban of SSB from schools since this is an area they have been trying to work with. 

I hope that from the infographics and previous posts you got an idea of how Maria´s and my internship was in Barbados.

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Final week, lots of work

Time has been flying for the last couple of weeks, and even though my internship finalizes officially this week, I have found myself with a lot of current and future work.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Maria and I were working on our report draft which is the result of our project “2017Barbados school Adolescent’s Environment”. During the last weeks, we focused on what are the most relevant findings to be communicated in the report, as well in which way should they be conveyed to cause an impact and to call attention regarding adolescents environment and its health influence.

I am happy to say that we have finalized that phase, and that our supervisor is currently reviewing the draft. That being said, we are waiting for her response and input to finally publish our report and to share it with you all.

That on a side, Maria and I took different paths for the last weeks of our internship, where I decided to come to Mexico and work from here. When I suggested to my supervisor if I could work on different projects from home – after finishing our report draft – she came up with a specific task that have kept me busy… I am currently trying to implement the “2017 Barbados School Adolescent’s Environment” in Monterrey, Mexico. Trying to implement the project means that I have translated the survey we have used (making it suitable for its culture), have contacted schools across the city and have tried to arrange the whole setting for the project.

I do not like using the term “trying”, but even at this point is hard to say if the project ni Mexico will be implemented at the same level as it was in Barbados. And justly, we prepared for 6 months previous arriving in Barbados whereas one week in Mexico cannot do the same justice. Nevertheless, there are few schools across the city that are willing to participate and hopefully the project can be conducted before I leave the country.

 The relevance of such project is that the results of both studies – Barbados and Mexico – can be compared.  Both countries have high obesity and NCDs rates, and both governments have implemented a taxation on Sweet Sugary Beverages (SSB), as one of many health interventions, in order to decrease these rates.

By the end of the week I will be able to let you know if I was able to obtained a representative sample that could represent Mexican adolescents. As well, I will hopefully be able to share with you our report or some sort of summary from the Bajan project.

I hope you have a great week, meanwhile I will be in Mexico trying to persuade people to not consume SSB and all the fatty food they love.

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Focus Group Interviews - Final step of research project

Another week has come to an end and so has our research project. During the week, Maria and I conducted 3 focus group interviews (FGI) – one per participating school – and they consisted of a group of 8-10 students representing the school. The FGI were the last step in the research project as it was aimed to provide more details of the consumption patterns among adolescents.

Even though we have never conducted a FGI before, the interview guide served precisely to guide us on how to follow up the discussion with the students. The FGI focused mainly on Sweet Sugary Beverages (SSB) and the marketing behind these products, together with other factors driving the consumption decisions such as their social context. The total time per session was 40 minutes, although some time was used to get the place in order before starting.

It was interesting to understand from the adolescents’ point of view the reasons behind why they choose to drink SSB so frequently, or why is it so high its daily consumption. As educated in the field of nutrition and health, one needs to be aware that we hold some “bias” when we try to make sense about people’s lifestyles, disapproving immediately unhealthy patterns and trying to make sense to them why healthier choices are better. It was no exception the case of these adolescents, however, instead of having those thoughts with me, I opened my mind and ears and try to understand and gain much as possible from these interviews.  

It seemed that the major reasons for drinking SSB are, firstly, the taste, together with the price of healthier options and seeing others with the beverages, opening the “craving” for them. It is not surprising that kids prefer to buy 1 cheap soda during their school lunch recess instead of a bottle of water, since the price of a bottle of water or even lemonade adds up to be 2 to 3 times more expensive than SSB, depending on the type of these. I see two main problems from this, 1. the price of healthy food and beverages at schools should be accessible and 2. banning or some regulations of SSB in schools should be implemented. The last one I believe will benefit one of the consumption reasons (the craving by seeing) by eradicating this completely. This might not change children and adolescents taste and preference for SSB, but it will help them to start reducing their consumption and to try other options to satisfy their thirstiness.

A little extra thing we did after out final FGI, was to ask the students to volunteer for writing health messages to their fellow students and to share with pictures. This will help to build up a campaign and/or policies for adolescents’ health and healthy meals and beverages in schools environments. Unfortunately boys will always be boys and they wanted to pose in this way... hope it can still be used the picture!

A short conclusion for the FGI, the results we attained supported the findings from the survey, but more than supporting, strengthened them and open new ideas of possible interventions for policy makers and/or organizations advocating for health.

Besides conducting the FGI, we started to interpreted the data and to write our report draft.  Most of our week has consisted mainly on recapping a lot of what we have learned in previous modules from GNH, touching upon qualitative research (FGI, transcription of interviews, coding), and quantitative research (statistics, analysing data, coding). Some of this allowed us to run some statistical tests although we have been working on more descriptive statistics.

Little snap of how our data looks (there are more rows and columns than what is showed)

I would love to present you the findings once our report  is finalized, so that you can have the whole idea of the outcome of this project and its process. Tomorrow we will meet our internship supervisor and Dance4Life to discuss the main findings and to agree on the report formats, hope we have something interesting to share with you next week! Thanks for reading!

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Workshop on SSB!!

Another week has come to an end with exciting experiences as well. On this week, Maria and I did our workshops on SSB on all 3 different schools, yet we will continue with 2 more classes next week.

On previous posts I mentioned these SSB workshops but didnt go in detail with their content. As you might now by now, we are doing a study in barbados which will gives us an insight of adolescent's dietary habits and lifestyle. As well, it will let us explore the diverse determinants behind their choices, which range from economical and social power, to the strong marketing of food and beverage industries (which are strongly targeting children and adolescents).

Our workshop contains different related topics;

- How the body works - energy requirements and physical activity. - What SSB are and what do they contain - Complications of frequent consumption of SSB - Brief introduction to NCDs - mainly diabetes and CVDs - Interactive learning by estimating real amount of sugar in different SSB (amount per container and serving sizes within it)

The last topic is the one of major interest to the students, or more likely the one where they want to participate the most. In this simple excercise we get an idea of the nutritional education these students have, since some of them understimate the real amount of sugar in these drinks. What is also important is that, not all students are aware of what SSB are (all non alcoholic beverage that have beeen added sugar; flavored milk, sports drinks, sodas, etc.).

Once we revealed the amount of sugar per container, it was so rewarding in a way to see the schocked faces, in the meaning that they might have taken with them valuable information. My favorite face/reaction I cannot get out of my head is from one teacher that observed the workshop. He literally had his mouth open when we revealed how many bags/pounds of sugar you consume per year if you consume one soda a day (35 pounds of sugar per year 😱)

On a side of doing our workshops, Maria and I have been working on few side assignment from HCC. One consisted of reviewing a framework previous to its publication,  which we found so so interesting for the GNH program! Especially because it consisted all what we have learned until now, but sadly I cannot share with you its content since is confidential, or at least until is published. Another -individual- assignment I have at the moment consist of blogging about the accessibility to whole fresh foods in Barbados. This is from the danish perspective coming to Barbados, where as you might know, there is high imports of process food and low availability of fresh foods. In addition to that, I am trying to add the mexican perception to it, so that it can be compared how trade and agricultural policies influence the available food in different countries.

Maria and I working at HCC. Please note that we pretended there was no camera (we were doing real work!)

Since I am not able to share with you the last two assignments yet, I will finish this post by wishing you all a great weekend! Hope to share this with you soon and hope you are doing great in your missions to change this world :)

Thanks forreading!

Ps. Our bajan accent and understanding is improving!

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Conducting survey among Bajan adolescents

Week 3 has come to an end and I could not be happier about it but concerned at the same time, and let me tell you why.

Our week started by Maria and I having to meet principals and student counsellors of our participating schools previous to conducting our survey, which gave us a feeling that our research is finally happening. After having these meetings, we sent our material to print and we were ready to start our project next day!

Tuesday arrived and it was time to work with our first group of the 3rd form (13-15 y-old) at St. Michaels School (SMS) where everything seemed to be under control, but I must admit that was intimidating at the beginning to be the “Ma’am” at the front of the class and to get the attention of teenagers. 

The following day we used it for typing data into our “analytical system” and to take care of minor tasks. 

Now, on Wednesday we went to St. Leonard´s Boys School (SLB) and we were so much looking forward to this school since we estimated it to be the most difficult one we had to deal with. Surprisingly we had no difficulties whatsoever, perhaps because of the type of discipline they have there (remember the story of the two boys that got into a fight?), perhaps because teachers and the student counsellor were checking on us once in a while. I believe our major challenge at SLB was the language since most of the the students carry a strong Bajan dialect which we find hard to understand. 

Finally, we went to Graydon Sealy School (GSS) on Friday not knowing what to expect since we did not have the chance to observe/participate in this school with Dance4life. Here the students were so polite and disciplined by always standing when the professor entered the classroom and by waiting to hear instructions. This order ended up giving us 15 min extra after completing the survey, time we used to have conversations about their lifestyle and eating patterns (picture bellow). On the following week we will have two more classes participating on the survey, followed by our SSB workshop.  

After sharing with you this brief anecdote of our first week under our project, I would like to share with you some observations and reflections I experienced. Even though we haven't finished collecting data and haven’t started to properly analyze it, I got already a big idea of how the results will look like from typing the data into our analytical system.

Is not only shocking/concerning to see the responses we got from the first groups, but to observe the environment these adolescents are surrounded by and to see how they are trapped into unhealthy circumstances is upsetting. You see, the schools not only provide “unhealthy meals” to the students (which tend to be chips, SSB, pastry, fried food, energy dense food, etc.) but they have street vendors just outside the school – from where we saw quite a large amount of students buying chips and sodas as breakfast. As well, they have teachers and/or student counsellors selling their products which again vary from SBB, pastry, ice pops, white buns with a tiny peace of cheese, etc.

Adolescents getting chips, pastry and SSB as “breakfast” from street vendors. 

That brought me to think - How or to what extent can policy makers work with problems such as decreasing overweight and obesity, banning SSB, etc., if a whole system as the culture of a country needs to be changed!? And I say culture because for every day I get to experience here, it seems that it is in its very core to have a high consumption of SSB, fried food and process food, with low consumption of fruits and vegetables and no physical activity. Supporting a little more my point of view, on our survey we get to ask questions as “if you eat a homemade dinner, what do you usually have?” and most of the responses have been falling into the categories “something fried” and “warm dishes like stews”. Now, thinking optimistically that kids don’t go to often to fast food restaurants/get fast food meals thus eating mostly at home, it does not necessarily mean that they are better off from these places if they eat fried-processed food with sodas at home.

That on a side, Barbados is facing the challenge of bringing back their traditional meals such as cou-cou and flying fish, cassava, breadfruit and sweet potatoes amongst others – due to these dishes/foods reminding people of slavery times, issue that the Ministry of Agriculture is dealing with.

These are only few challenges policy makers and health professionals have to deal with, and I am happy to say that it only encourages me to make a difference in this world and to answer my question soon as possible.

Hope you enjoyed the post and please share your thoughts!  

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A different type of learning

My second week has come to an end I am happy not so happy to say that I have learnt from it in many different ways, and here is why.

At the beginning of the week Maria and I started to prepare all the different material for our research “2017 Barbados School Adolescent’s Environment” which will kick off on Tuesday the 28th.

We started by shopping the material for the workshops and by preparing the posters we will be using – picture bellow– together with a sketch for these sessions. Our workshop will focus on the SSB and the effects of their consumption on a prolonged period, such as overweight, obesity and NCDs, but I will get back to our workshops on week 4 when we run them.

 As well, we created an interview guide for our focus group interviews which will be conducted on our 5th week as the final step of our research. Both our focus group interviews and survey will focus on adolescents eating habits (specially SSB), the reason behind their food and beverage choices, and the power of marketing behind these choices.

Finally, we have been reviewing and editing our survey with HCC and Dance4Life, process which has lasted the whole week.  The time and process behind our survey has been somewhat slow since we have different stakeholders involved in our project, reason why I mentioned above that I am happy not so happy for what I have learnt this week. I have understood that any cooperation between organisations and its employees takes time and lots and lots of patience, especially when the person organizing and conducting the project/research comes from a different work culture.

 Besides working on our own project, we met on Tuesday with our internship supervisor who introduced us to another student who is working with HCC on a different project. Daniela is a public health master’s student who is looking into people’s knowledge on food and beverage labelling and if they make use of their knowledge when they purchase items at the supermarkets (or if they don not look at the label at all). The purpose of her research is to highlight the importance of food label regulations in Barbados – since there is non existing, and to hopefully teach the public to read and understand them in order to make healthier choices. We were introduced to her since we will help her to collect data at different supermarkets in all Barbados. This “volunteer” work is not related to our internship itself but we find it highly relevant for our education. I truly hope that this will help me to understand how Bajan people think when it comes to buy food items, and the reasons behind their choices, either if they are economical, cultural, etc.

 Agrofest – The National Agricultural Exhibition

Another extra activity we have done this week (not related to our internship but to our GNH program) is to assist to the Agrofest in Bridgetown, which seeks to sensitize Barbadians of the importance of the agricultural sector. We saw and met people from many different organizations, such as FAO, The Ministry of Health, Organic Growers and Consumers Association and Slow Food Barbados (SFB) to mention a few. We had an especial interest on meeting SFB since we are hoping to volunteer and work with them on the following weeks, and I must say it was such a nice feeling to meet them and get a hint of what they do and how they do it. They were so eager to know what we are doing on our internship and more into see how they could help us to reach our goal. This led John, one of the members, to put us in contact with someone at PAHO since we were talking about the lack of national surveys and information on children and adolescent’s consumptions habits, anthropometrics and health status overall. We look so much forward to meet this person at PAHO and to see if we can somehow do something in this regard. At least we will emphasize the need for updated numbers on the Bajan population, since their last national survey (only for adults) was done in 2000.

 Lastly, I want to say we tried the best Ital food at the Agrofest by the sweetest Rastafari old man. I have been struggling with the availability and accessibility of food in Barbados, but one thing I love here is the lovely cosy and friendly people we meet everywhere, and more important those that have delicious food! :)

 Thanks for reading!!

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Getting started, observational week

It has come to an end the first week of my internship and I would like to share with you my experience so far from lovely little Barbados.

On the last post I shared with you my expected learning objectives I aim to reach during this internship, and I stated that they would greatly depend on a meeting held this week. Maria and I had such meeting first thing Monday morning, together with HCC and Dance4Life, organizations that have been facilitating our research project here as I mentioned in my last post. I am happy to say that everything will go as planned, we will be able to conduct our research with all 3 different means; survey, workshops and focus group interviews, and we will also assist on different projects for HCC. At the meeting was decided the magnitud of our research project, which will consist of approx. 330 participants and  a schedule that can work for all 4 schools for the next month was created. As well, to ensure we will approach  adolescents in the right way with a full understanding of how they interact within their culture and environment, we were set to visit schools with Dance4Life for 2 days. These observational days - Tuesday and Thursday - have definitely gave me a better insight of how teenagers interact in Barbados, and let me tell you how much differs from school to school.

The first school we visited was St. Michael School, which holds the 3rd place of best schools in Barbados and will be one of the participating schools for our project. We had a great time observing Dance4Life’ lessons which consists mainly on HIV, STIs and Substances and Substitutes - and loved to see how kids interact and participate in these subjects. It was in fact impressive to see how much they knew about cells, the diseases, natural sciences and all the knowledge behind it. From the picture bellow, you can see how these kids were participative and eager to give their opinion. I believe that from the picture you can deduct as well the type of discipline they have and the type of school St. Michael is. 

The second school we visited was very different from the first one and will not participate in our project. However, is was very enriching to visit this school since it gave us an idea of the socioeconomic gap between regions and schools in Barbados. We were told by locals that it is common in Barbados for many students to leave the country in order to have a good education, so many go to different universities mainly in Canada or the UK.  We were also told that most or all of these students will not leave the country nor even the area where they live, and many of them will not go to University. The point I want to arrive with this is that there is a huge difference between the first and second school not only by the area of where they are located, but by the type of class and students as well. The following picture is from the class we attended at that school, and one can notice that the teacher is using a microphone to speak due to the noise in the class, yet this didn’t help her much. 

Moving to the last school we went, St. Leonard’s Boys, it is a school that only enrolls males, fact you can deduct from the school name. Amazingly this school surprised me the most, not because is a one sex school or because of their impressive nice physical education class where students were jumping long distances on “distance jump” (picture bellow) - but because of the type of discipline they have there.

It seemed to be a nice day and a lovely class (it was the second class we had at this school) but an incidence occurred. While students got into the classroom, two boys got into a fight unfortunately, and God I was scared that they were going to hurt themselves bad. The principal got into the classroom to stop the fight and took these students with him. Later on, they came back to apologize to the teachers and the class but that was not all..

When we got to this school I found a stick on a table as you can see in the picture bellow. This stick is used as a punishment tool for those students that misbehave, but I couldn’t believe it. Back to the story of these two boys, after apologizing to everybody they went out of the classroom again and I couldn’t believe my ears. They were being punished with the stick and one could hear how they were being whipped. I just had a huge intercultural experience, I just couldn’t believe that these methods were still allowed and used! Maybe I’m using a lot of sentiments here but was shocking. 

In the final picture bellow, you can see how the kids from this school are in their classes. They did participate but not as St. Michaels School, just different and in their unique way. I believe that this was exactly the point of the observational week at schools, to see how much differs from one to another. 

These observations allowed us to start to modify our survey and workshops, so that the research project is suitable for the participants. 

On a side of going to schools, we helped with small tasks at HCC since they are holding a big meeting in Antigua and Barbuda this weekend. This meeting is aimed for NCD Advocacy, Accountability and Conflict of Interest and will have as participants different ministries from the Caribbean as well different stakeholders from different areas. It was so interesting to observe how such meeting was organized and the different things they had to go over as organizers. We were also offered to read, edit and comment on a policy brief draft “NCD and the Ministry of Agriculture”. Without hesitating we accepted such task and will review next week.

I hope I can bring on my next post more information regarding NCD and agriculture, trade and all the different factors that play a role in the health system of Barbados. At least I hope to get into it and shared it with you through research and experiences.

I am off for today since I got to go and celebrate my birthday :) 

Thanks for reading!

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The preparation behind an internship and purpose of it

Time has come to do my first internship after completing the first year and half of my bachelor education, Global Nutrition and Health at Metropol. It is that time when I will put into practice all the theory and knowledge I have gained and learnt in the past years.

My peer Maria and I have arrived in Barbados, destination where we will do our Internship at the Healthy Caribbean Coalition HCC. The HCC is a NGO in the Caribbean which fights the burden of non-communicable diseases and their associated risk factors and conditions. They mainly work in the areas of advocacy, enhancing communication, capacity building and promoting m-Health and e-Health. But before getting into detail of what I will be doing at the HCC and our individual project, I would like to share with you the preparation process we have been through in the last 6 months, how we found the organisation and how it came to be the one we want to work with.

Back in April last year, our generation had the opportunity to volunteer for the Women Deliver Conference 2016 and thus we were able to attend different conferences. One of these focused on non-communicable diseases where Maisha Hutton, executive director of HCC – was presenting the work HCC does in the Caribbean. After the conference few students and I got to talk with her and present the idea of a possible internship with them, and I must say that her response was very positive. Later in July we started sending emails to different organisations including HCC, process that last a whole month just for displaying mutual interests and benefits that would come with such internship. Once these were specified and agreed on, we started to work on possible project ideas that we could work with, so that we could create something that will give us great practice in the field and something the organisation could use in the future for the different projects they work with.

This lead us to focus in different topics such as sugar sweetened beverages, marketing to children, and the possible determinants behind unhealthy lifestyles amongst adolescents.

From a combination of the different topics, we will conduct a study in secondary schools together with Dance4life, organisation that is member of the SRHR alliance. Such study aims to apply a survey, conduct focus group interview and do workshops, all three with students from 9th and 10th grades. That being said, it is not concluded to this very day the magnitude of the project, since we do not have direct contact with schools in Barbados and is out of our hands the decision.

On a side of the study, we ambitiously aim to participate in different hoc office assignments at HCC and hope to attend meetings dealing with great topics relevant to our specialization PHN&FP.

 I would like to end this post by sharing my expected learning objectives I aim to reach in this internship.

· Gain sufficient experience and understanding of handling qualitative and quantitative data from large scale surveys and focus groups interviews.

· To be capable of analyse and write the responses from a study into a scientific base paper.

· To be actively involved in health promotion programs.

· To actively participate and comprehend the diverse dynamics within a civil society organisation for the prevention of obesity and NCDs, and the work behind developing health promotion programs.

Lastly, weather these learning objectives will be reached will greatly depend on our first meeting with HCC and Dance4life which will be hold next week, same time when we will officially start our internship.