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	<img alt="" src="{filedir_5}Mozhgon-Rajaee-250pxl.jpg" style="width: 150px; height: 201px; float: right;" /><em>Mozhgon Rajaee is a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan School of Public Health in the Environmental Health Sciences Department. A graduate of Spring Arbor University, Mozhgon spent the summer of 2006 at Au Sable, studying at both the Great Lakes and Pacific Rim Campuses. She has been an Au Sable Graduate Fellow since 2008 and served as the UM student coordinator since 2010. As you&#39;ll read below, Mozhgon&#39;s research takes her to a small community in Ghana that relies heavily on gold extraction, often with few environmental safeguards&nbsp;</em><em>for the mercury-intensive extraction process</em><em>.</em></p>
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	The community I&rsquo;ve worked in for the past three years is small, inhabited by only about 2,500 people. The houses are simple and small, and surrounded by a flurry of noisy activity. The driving force behind the community is gold, which is deposited throughout the country. Homes are intimately mixed with mining equipment, making it impossible to live more than a few meters from some type of mining activity. The community, located in northeast Ghana, forces my western mind to think differently about work.&nbsp;</p>
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	As part of my research project, I spent about a week last August returning results of mercury concentrations in hair and urine samples and blood pressure collected during the summer of 2011 to two communities in northeast Ghana: A small-scale gold mining community and a comparison subsistence farming community.</p>
