Today was the second day of the epidemiology course, which didn't require any teaching from me (yay!). Instead, my job was to sit in the back of the room and either: a) mess around on my iPad while Dr. Smoak evaluated the Ukrainian trainers; or b) have the translator sitting next to me talking pretty much right in my ear to translate what the trainers were saying so I could evaluate them. Needless to say, option a was more fun.
We have two different translators for this course, a really nice and fairly young Ukrainian woman, and a fat, old Ukrainian man who smells like a mixture of vodka, cigarettes, and the cheap mint breath spray he uses to cover up the first two smells. Needless to say, the woman is the ideal, but aside from her more pleasant aesthetic features, her translations are also much easier to understand. The man messes up numbers all the time (and numbers are kinda important when you're talking about disease surveillance and epidemiology/biostatistics) and tends to get lazy when he thinks it doesn't matter.
Translators aside, the students seemed to be doing fairly well with understanding the material, which, one can conclude, means that the trainers are doing fairly well. We've identified a few minor issues over the last two days (many of which might be semantics), which isn't bad at all. Hopefully this continues through the week.
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