What I do….A New Hope....

Creative title if I do say so myself. Any guesses as to why I chose this? If you think you know feel free to post a comment below with your guess. It has come to my attention thanks to my one of my greatest enemies who at the same time can be my best friend i.e. my self-conscious or Jiminy Cricket (my apologies for the Disney reference, yes Fiona this is another thing I don’t like) that I have written very little on Ripplefxs about me, my time here in South Africa and what I do here for work, fun and more. I started this blog with the idea of sharing about my time here but have found that it has been a good place to share my epiphanies, rants and random thoughts with you as well as a cathartic activity. I promise to return to the theme of “my life” from time to time.

I would like to briefly recap what I covered in my first and second entries just a month ago to share a bit of the work I do and purpose behind my 6 months here. I am working, as an HIV/AIDS consultant, for an Ashoka Fellow, Linzi Smith, who was a government nurse for over 15 years in the province of KwaZulu-Natal. Linzi started Education, Training and Counselling (ETC) five years ago after a trip to the United States which inspired her to take a new approach to the HIV/AIDS situation here in South Africa. Along with Linzi, who works about 16 hours a day, I work with Douglas Smith, Linzi’s husband, and Ben Brown. I have mentioned about Doug before as he is very memorable, funny and kind and Ben who I watched play soccer my second weekend here and who has an amazing story of his own that I hope to share in a future blog posting.

Last Friday, Ben was finishing facilitating a five day training at a mining company where he was training a “select” group of employees to be certified “peer educators”. Four of the people out of about 20 that he was training disclosed to him on the final day that they were HIV positive. Ben stayed much later than normal to counsel these four individuals and he only began to start the two hour trip home around 6 PM. One of the people had only been tested last Tuesday, the day after the course started, and thus was disclosing some very traumatic and personal information with Ben who as is his nature stayed to provide the best support and care that he could. I will write more about Ben later but should get back to “my life” which is not to say that Ben, Linzi, Doug and others are not a part of it as they are a huge part and I am grateful to each of them for their friendship, guidance and all the rest.

So far my work has mainly consisted of helping around the office with various computer problems (I am not an expert but sometimes it is all relative), searching for funding sources and grant writing, marketing/sales and preparing PowerPoint presentations. Next week I am excited to tell you I will participate in and co-facilitate my first peer educator training. I will give a more in depth explanation next week of “peer educator” training in the context of HIV/AIDS, South Africa and ETC.

I am really looking forward to this training as it seems to be the seminal component to the work that is/can be done to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, protect the rights of people that are HIV + and prolong the lives of people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) through proper nutrition, exercise, medication, etc. I have been told this training is a life changing experience for many and it was for Ben, who I will have to ask to do a guest blog entry. You can look for more on “what I do” in a future blog and don’t forget to guess why I chose the title for this blog.