Avian influenza, my new best friend

So I have a new job within AED, at least for the next two months. I'm working on various activities for USAID on avian influenza. So I've been doing quite a bit of thinking about how people can keep their chickens away from their ducks -- a very effective way to keep avian flu at bay, if you can believe it. Now farmers just have to keep their kids from playing with bloody chicken heads and we'd all be a lot better off.

Anyway, I came across this article "The bug bloggers: A brigade of self-made bird flu experts is turning the outbreak rumor mill into an online information factory"
about the power of blogs in getting information out when it's needed, mostly because they feel they can't rely on their governments to give them the straight story in a timely fashion. Man, it's a miracle we all survived before this Internets thing came along. Here is the link to the story: http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=jf06harris

It quotes this guy, Paul Revere (that's his blogging pseudonym) who runs a blog called Effect Measure. I met him at the American Public Health Association Annual Meeting last December in Philly at a session on how the public health field can use blogs, wikis, etc. to improve the public health. It was pretty inspirational that all these people were trying to start a movement from the ground up -- all these people who had day jobs and wives and kids who were spending countless hours blogging during the wee hours to create a new public health infrastructure (online) to make it easier to mobilize in the event of a pandemic or a bioterrorist event.

I hope it's all worth it. You always hear these stories of people like this who do so much, and then you hear about how they are divorced or how they don't know their kids' names. So maybe I'm exaggerating, but I feel like it's so hard to strike a balance, especially when you are serious about your career and your volunteer work/extracurriculars AND you are raising a family.

I wonder whether all of these impressive people I work with now -- people who have done amazing things in tons of developing countries over the past 25 years -- have done all this while juggling family life, and if so, HOW IN THE WORLD THEY DID IT? (I mean, even as I'm typing this blog post, I've been singing to Azalea and pretending that I'm writing a letter to the dentist -- part of her pretend play right now. She's really into dentists. Go figure. Hopefully she'll still be into them after her first dentist visit at the beginning of February.) I did a lot of stuff too -- when I was single. Not anymore.

Okay, so I know this post is all over the place, but that is the state of my brain these days. I really only wanted to post that bird flu blog article. Now I have to go get dinner out of the oven and get ready to go to a Habitat for Humanity meeting at the church. And then come back home, get the kids to bed, do some housecleaning and work on some avian flu stuff. How do people do this long-term?