Thursday, July 20, 2006

My Job.

Although my job is still being defined and refined I can tell you a bit about the work that I will do in South Africa over the next six months. I am working with Linzi, Douglas and Ben as an HIV/AIDS consultant for ETC, Education, Training and Counselling which means I will be doing work around the office such as marketing and sales calls, grant writing and research and work in the field (factories, mines, government offices) such as training/facilitating HIV/AIDS

Peer Educator Courses, HIV Committee Development Programmes (I will be using British English for certain terms as that is the English primarily used here) and other knowledge, education and prevention trainings on HIV/AIDS.
I have already had a variety of experiences in my first few days including accompanying Doug on a sales call to a brewery looking to do some HIV/AIDS education with its employees and joined Linzi on a two-day HIV Committee Development Programme with 12 participants at a government office in Tshwane (formerly called Pretoria), which is South Africa’s national capitol and is located 63 kilometers (39 miles) from Joburg. Gauteng Province is one of nine provinces in South Africa is the smallest in terms of km²/mi² but has the second largest population with 8,837,172 about 600,000 people behind KwaZulu-Natal with 9,426,018 inhabitants (2001 Census). Gauteng Province is located in the Northeastern Region of RSA (Republic of South Africa) along with the province of Mpumalanga which is the province nearest to Mozambique and one I visited a few times while in Moz when I wanted to have time in RSA. I will share more about the countries geography, history, culture, etc. in later entries and now want to get back to the training.

Since this was my first time attending one of the many trainings that ETC offers I took this first chance to sit in with the participants and follow through the training manual as they were doing, participate in individual, small and large group activities. I also kept notes on Linzi’s facilitating with questions, compliments and suggestions as well as other questions about material covered, statistics, etc. I will leave you with this for now and return to this training at a later point to tell you more about the attitudes, perceptions, questions and ideas that the participants brought to the training and how these were addressed and hopefully corrected or clarified over the two day training.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Was sup Blake,

Great to hear from you and that you arrived safely in South Africa. It sounds like you are going to be very busy in your practicum. Enjoy your time there and I hope that you learn a lot.
By the way, thanks for sending the link about An Inconvenient Truth, I plan on going to check it out tomorrow.
Best of luck to you.
Alisha
MAT 37

Anonymous said...

Hi Blake..
Thank you for sharing your blog, keep updating it okey, I am looking forward to reading each progress of your wonderful work!

good luck and take care
Julia

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the detailed description of your job profile. I look forward to hearing about how South Africans respond to the training an the issues/questions that they raise. There has been so much publicity about President Mbeki's questionning many of the HIV/AIDS "facts" we accept as true.

Since you ledt the US before "Who Killed the Electric Car" was released I wanted to alert your blog readers to this new documentary which carefully tells about the development of the electic car in and its use in CA and AZ from 1995-2005 and the subsequent successful campaign by the car's makers and big oil to recall and destroy every electric car before they became too popular and revolutionized our driving habits. See www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com and www.pluginamerica.com... as citizens attempt to influence the development of plug-ins.

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping