Recent Activities

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I have a cold. Yup, its winter here in the southern hemisphere of the world and I have a cold. Always a strong believer on taking a day off, I am in bed drinking tea with milk and honey. I’m not sure how many people actually read this blog but my mom insists that I write more so here goes nothing. Over the past few weeks we have been working on a major project attempting to screen around 8,000 children for HIV. In order to do this we allied with a large Christian organization being run out of Texas. They hold a “summer camp” (did I mention that its winter? I’m not sure if I’ve talked about this, but living here is slowly teaching me how to hate Americans. Alright…granted, if you know me you know I’ve felt this way for a while, but for some reason the people that come to Africa really compound that feeling. I’ll come back to that later) in Lusaka during June and July. The purpose of the summer camp is of course to tell kids that no matter how much their lives suck Jesus loves them. They spend millions of dollars organizing this absurd affair and we were able to convince them that they could actually do something of value by allowing us to set up screening at the camp. What does that mean exactly? Well, we sent out consent forms to be signed by the caregivers (this is the term generally used for legal guardians in Africa seeing as a vast number of children don’t have or live with parents). On the first day of screening it became immediately obvious that any children that were actually at risk for HIV did not have the consent forms signed. We set up tents in the center of the camp where the counselors bring the children with signed consent forms for testing. The testing is very simple: A finger prick for a drop of blood on a test strip, results are clear within 5 minutes.

Despite the simplicity, controversy abounds. The common belief in Africa is that the white man takes people’s blood in order to do voodoo on them. So for every outreach, community organization and education are necessary so as to allay any suspicions. In general we’ve been pretty successful at gaining the trust of people. However, in this case, the numbers are so great that we have effectively outsourced our education process. We “trained” community leaders who were supposed to go out and convince individuals. Obviously, this has not worked out so well. Rumors have begun in one community that we’re taking blood at the camp. Parents are urged not to send their children. The organizers, much more concerned with saving souls than saving lives, have asked us not to come to camp anymore.

Back to why I hate Americans in Africa. Not only are they too stupid to realize that just because its summer in America doesn’t mean its summer in Africa, additionally school is in session right now, so in order to attend camp the children all have to miss what minimal school they have. The Americans claim this is good for the children because the schools are such awful places…a sentiment which, while I partially see where they come from, is just plain stupid. This organization is by far one of the wealthiest I have come across here in Africa and instead of spending money on food, water, clothes, medicine, social justice, or any of the MANY things these children actually NEED, all of their money goes into bringing Americans here to preach and setting up this stupid camp. I have to note also that they think the camp is good for the kids because they get to eat full meals every day, by this they mean plentiful peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. While that may sound like heaven to an American child, there is a strange concept in Zambian culture that a meal is not a meal without their staple food, N’shima. So, every single one of these children, after eating 6 peanut butter sandwiches will still claim to be hungry. Despite the fact that this camp has been going on for years, the organizers have not managed to figure this out.

Ok…so all of those things are just annoying, not enough to really make me hate them…just shows their stupidity. However, on the first day of camp as we’re setting up our supplies in our little tent a woman carefully approaches me and another white volunteer I’m working with. This woman, mind you, is one of the main organizers of the camp. She looks around to make sure we’re alone and asks us, “I know this is probably a silly question, but do you think it’s safe for me to get tested?” We stare at her, “I mean…are you using sterile needles?” more silence.
My co-worker, far more even-tempered than I, finally responds, demonstrating the packaging.
“Yeah, but I mean, are they, like, Africa-sterile or American-sterile?” I’m still staring at this woman in dumbfounded silence and my co-worker is beginning to lose his cool,
“What exactly does Africa-sterile mean?” He asks her.
“I mean, I know this sounds silly but where did you buy them? Are you sure they’re safe to use on ME?” Silly is not the word I would use to describe her questioning. I’m very close to interjecting something to the effect of, ‘oh, don’t worry, we keep a special SAFE stash to use on white people, we only risk using the contaminated needles on Africans’. My co-worker explains that all of the medical equipment we use is technically exactly the same as what is used in the US and this seems to convince her. Nearly identical conversations continue to occur throughout the day. I’m not terribly disappointed that we won’t be going back.

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Comments

[JamesRo]

whoooaaa
man that is outrageous to me. I'm losing my cool just reading about this stuff. I promise a long juicy email very soon! -Mikro (haha you win)

[pen-in-hand]

"summer" camp
Sounds like we need more volunteer organizations in the world where the funding isn't tied to religion. The organization you describes sounds counter-productive in the extreme.