June 10th

Hello!
Obviously it’s been a while since I blogged, sorry about that. Last week we were winding up classes and all the girls were going their separate ways, so I spent a lot of time just hanging out with them. Also, I finally picked up my socks and started writing daily journal entries about my lectures (as I am supposed to be doing every day and remembered this last week) so I got sick of re-telling everything I was doing. I also got to talk with dad and Jen on the phone and I got to skype with Steve for the first time, so I have felt pretty plugged-in to the goings on in Canada. Haha, you’re all roasting and it’s only 20 degrees Celsius here!

I guess the most significant thing we did last week was we visited our second HIV clinic, except this one was in a really rural area. It was called Ikaya-Labomie and it was run by a woman who had lectured to us about traditional medicine named Patience. We had a ton of trouble finding the place because our driver is deaf, so he originally took us to a Zulu safari place which is also in the Valley of a Thousand Hills. Funny! One of the girls was actually like “Cool! An AIDS clinic at a safari!” Haha :)

We ended up picking up an older lady who knew where it was and she had her grandson with her, so she got a free ride and all of us girls got to fawn over the baby. When we finally arrived at the clinic, I was struck by how massive it was. I had expected it to be the same as Hillcrest which only had about 50 beds, but this place looked like a huge storage building for farm machinery. Apparently it had been donated to the community. To my surprise when we went INTO the building, we discovered that it was empty. Completely. There was a fully equipped kitchen, about 200 beds, a section for children, lots of wheelchairs…and no people. It turns out they had run out of money to run the hospital and that it had been like this since 2009! I could not get over how a government would spend 9 million Rand (over a million CAD) equipping this huge hospital in an area with a really high HIV prevalence, and then refuse to give it funding to keep functioning. But, Patience told us hopefully, that she would be opening the hospital this week. I was pretty shocked, so I asked her about it. It turns out, the hospital runs almost completely on volunteers, except for a few doctors and herself (a registered nurse) and the community had gathered together enough money to get the hospital going. So, somehow, they were going to open this week (and every bed would be taken) without any stable source of income. Every place that our group visited on our ‘reality tours’, we gave a donation. Our donation for the hospital apparently was going toward starting a micro-business which would bring in a small amount of cash for the hospital. Now, I’m not sure if Patience is crazy (she just says that she has faith and that we all should too, which made me smile and laugh a bit), but she really believes that this will work. Looking back, it makes me sad to imagine what it will be like when the money runs dry and they have to close their doors again, but I think it will do a lot of good for the time it is open.

On the bright side though, we got to meet 2 lovely ladies who were friends with Patience who had been treated at the hospital when it was open. Both are HIV positive, and one (Kosi) has tuberculosis. This was my first time meeting someone who was openly HIV positive and needless to say, I was pretty excited :) Janet was the first person to talk with us and she was the most adorable woman I have ever met. She spoke in this really soft voice and she was obviously pretty shy (probably partially due to the fact that she was speaking in English and her first language is isiZulu). She giggled a lot and was so warm, cracking jokes about ‘jolling’ (a South African slang term for ‘having a good time’) and how that had lead to her being HIV positive. It was very inspiring to meet someone who looked so healthy and happy who is living with HIV. She is obviously on Anti-retrovirals (ARVs) which are said to have the “Lazarus effect” because people can be on the verge of death from HIV and then they get onto ARVs and are suddenly well. Anyway, it was a really enlightening experience and I’m glad I did it.

This week I started my placement. It is an amazing experience, I have never met so many people who are passionate about the same stuff as me! And they all keep inviting me back and telling me that I absolutely have to do grad school here :) I am feeling like the networking queen-I have had 2 meetings with Alan Whiteside who is one of the leading researchers in HIV/AIDS in Southern Africa and he is the director of Health Economics and HIV/AIDS Research Division (HEARD). He wrote the article that Khadija and I are doing an impact assessment for. I feel very grown up-I have my own office (well, me and Dij share) and I get to talk with people who are all finished their masters or have PhDs and talk with them about where their research is taking them. People cannot believe I only just finished my second year of my undergrad, I feel like I have won the lottery to be so privileged! There is an AIDS Conference going on here in Durban this week, so the office has been pretty quiet. I have all of next week to finish my half of the data analysis, but to be honest I think I will be finished my second draft by the end of today (Friday of the first week). Alan is going to give us odd jobs and let us sit in on meetings for the rest of the week-yaaaaaay! That is not sarcasm by the way.

We had a guest speaker come in from California to talk about how to implement valuable sex education programs in schools in South Africa and Dij and I got to sit in, which was really cool. He talked over my head a bit (because everyone other than me and Dij know lots about…basically everything) but it was still a really neat experience. It was the strangest feeling to be sitting in the board room taking notes on how to implement policy-I felt so adult! I have decided I really love HEARD. I should probably give some background about why there was ever any doubt.

Basically, in aid work/philanthropy/research for people with HIV/AIDS, there are 2 kinds of people in South Africa. There are the people who are DOING the work on the ground (like Patience and the people we met at Hillcrest and the group of women who we met at a meeting for ‘women in social movements in Durban’) and who understand the locals. Then there are the academics, who do research and write papers about what the best way is to do things. Often, there is very little communication between the 2 and the academics look down on the grassroots people (or ‘community scholars’ as they are sometimes known). This has been infuriating for me because I believe that your education should be achieved in order to make an impact. However, many professors are so out of touch with the real issues that they CAN’T make a difference (or choose not to). I have decided I like HEARD because it is really focused on bridging that gap. Everyone here does fieldwork while also doing research and a lot of them have established real relationships with community scholars. I think I would like working here.

Tonight Dij and I are flying out to Johannesburg for the weekend so we can see the apartheid museum and go on a tour of Soweto (South Western Township-a centre for protest during the fall of apartheid). Next Thursday is a national holiday to commemorate the Soweto uprisings in 1976 which sparked the beginning of the end of apartheid. Students (as young as eight) took to the streets in protest against the Bantu Education Act (which tailored education based on race-blacks could only learn basic trades and they schools were barely funded) and the newly appointed leaders of the Bantustans who were disconnected from the needs of the people and were known as ‘puppet governments’. The uprisings were relatively violent and they led to a movement among blacks to make the townships/Bantustans 'ungovernable'. All this hit the Western media, leading to increased sanctions and eventually, the crumbling of apartheid. Mandela and Desmond Tutu also both lived in Soweto. I am really looking forward to seeing it!

That’s all for now from me. Hope you all don’t melt from the heat :)

Love Heather