foreign lands and lots of sand

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Greetings from Cape Town! I finished out the week working with my kids during the days (yes, they're "mine"!! I just LOVE them and their smiley faces!!) There is one nanny who has taken an interest into some of the activities I have been doing with the children, so she has been a big help and I hope she will be a key player in education with regards to the feeding of the children.

As part of our cultural immersion here, we spent a lot of time attending workshops on HIV/AIDS in South Africa, talking about why Southern Africa has the highest concentrated rate of HIV/AIDS in the world, and factors of stigma, political involvement, government run clinics, etc. We had the honor of spending some time with a young man from the townships here who is HIV positive and who very boldly told us about his journey with the disease. He is full of wonderful ideas to promote education and awareness within his community, and even is trying to get government funding so that the people in the townships can begin planting their own small gardens so that they can have access to vegetables (as a diet of samp and beans does not help the immune system, which he found out after he developed pneumonia and TB and spent 10 months in the hospital). Did you know that there is some government funding for distributing medications to infected people, but there are 2 big issues surrounding this process. One is that people are not wanting to access the local clinics because, in his words, "the nurse is always your neighbor". Once people find out a person is HIV positive, they are really ostracized within their community ... The other is that people are being put on disability once they become sick and begin receiving 1000ZAR a month (about $125), but the drugs are helping people to become much better, so much so that they become "healthy and employable" again and they get taken off disability. Many of these people are unemployed and with a clean bill of health, are still not getting work. What is happening is that people stop taking their medications so that they can stay on disability and receive the 1000ZAR every month. So, essentially, people are dying who shouldn't be, and it's also creating a drug resistant strand of HIV. Whew.....

This weekend is actually a holiday weekend here in SA (Monday is Women's Day - why don't we have this in the U.S.?!), so we've had a bit of free time. Yesterday, a few of us went sandboarding up in the sand dunes. It was quite the day, full of climbing up sand mountains and eating sand. Pictures to follow!

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