Day 1

The best news of everyone’s summer so far …. the blog is back! For the new people we’ll introduce ourselves (sadly lacking Amber and Kyrillos so Haleigh apologizes if the blog lacks a certain humor but we’re expecting Aayush to step up).

For those of you who don’t know us or what LFR is, peruse the website for the latter, and continue reading to learn more about what we’re doing here.

I’m Haleigh, I’m the Operations Director for LFR and a rising senior at Washington University in St. Louis majoring in biomedical engineering. If you were confused by the first paragraph, I spent six weeks in Mukono, Uganda last summer to implement lay first responder programs (shameless plug for our blog from that trip linked on the same page).

And I’m Aayush, a recent Michigan neuroscience graduate and fellow at LFR. This is my first trip with LFR and I’m excited to get to work with our partners and eat some fufu!

Mary will also be joining us next week and we’ll introduce her then!

The two of us are nationally certified EMTs, and through LFR, we have the opportunity to train first responders in resource-limited settings. Many of these areas experience a large number of accidents and injuries on their roadways, yet don’t have any sort of “911” emergency system. LFR’s goal is to create sustainable prehospital infrastructure in these regions, utilizing the network of motorcycle taxi drivers that can already transport injured patients. In Lagos, Nigeria, we have partnered with the Health Emergency Initiative (HEI) and the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) to implement these systems. You can read Zach and Ashwin’s copycat attempt at a blog on our website during their time in Nigeria last summer (jkjk they’re great).

Anyways, we’ve spent most of the trip so far sitting on planes so not much to report yet unfortunately, unless you want an hour by hour play by play of our seven hour layover in Paris where Haleigh played musical chairs to try to find a working outlet, with a brief hiatus to watch the US women’s soccer team lose in penalty kicks :(. Aayush has been to Paris, but he’s never seen the Eiffel Tower so has he really been to Paris?? We don’t think so. Aayush also had a mystery sandwich that he preemptively rated a 6/10 and still couldn’t tell you what was in it but the 6/10 held up. Unrelated side note, Haleigh had to throw out like 60 ounces of water at security in France because she went overboard on buying bottles and then gained two more on the flight… tragic. And both of our carry on bags got stopped by security - Aayush was a large threat with his pair of scissors. We were also surprised to be stopped by airport officials after grabbing our checked bags to make sure they belonged to us - a much better strategy than the free for all in the US tho we think!

We also met the HEI Project Coordinator, Mayowa, who kindly waited over three hours at the airport for us! We’re going to try to fix our sleep schedules to avoid major jet lag but we will keep everyone updated on our adventures for the next three weeks!

Don’t worry, squarespace is still out to get Haleigh - it took her like an hour and a half to create this blog this morning. And of course we didn’t forget about the pictures!

Taking off from JFK, this is what happens when two people try to take a picture at the same time (@ Haleigh’s mom and dad)

Taking off from New York!

The only sights we got of the French countryside

Living out our Paris dreams with pain au chocolat from Pret a Manger, it was shockingly difficult to get anything resembling a crossaint despite our location tsk tsk

Is Aayush flexible enough to do the seated yoga demonstration video for the entire 7 hour flight? Or could he not even finish the four minute video…

Approaching Lagos!

Welcome to Lagos!