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.

Myths, beliefs and stigma.

This is in follow up to my last posting where I started to tell about HIV Committee Development Programme training that Linzi led last week and I participated in and as well as giving feedback and ideas to Linzi. I mentioned attitudes, perceptions, questions and ideas from the group of 11 participants and I want to share some of these with you. Before reading further you should know that some of these descriptions are quite graphic and unpleasant, but also necessary and education, so read at your own risk.

Many of the ideas that came up were similar to ones I had heard in Mozambique while I lived there from friends, colleagues and my students. Ideas such as when you use a condom you get HIV because it is being put in condoms to infect Africans, HIV is a punishment from God to sinners (yes, to these people, this does include babies, people who receive blood transfusions, as they are getting it because of “sins of the father” or something like that) and you can cure yourself of HIV if you sleep with a virgin or young child/infant. Yes, these are ideas that some (not all) of the participants either believed in or had heard, these “old wives tales” and many more where shared during the two-day training These are the backwards, contradictory and controversial beliefs that we are facing in this work and part of the reason that HIV is spreading so quickly and easily throughout much of Africa and the rest of the world.

It was clear from early in the training that the participants all had awareness of HIV/AIDS. Awareness in this instance purely meaning that they knew that it existed, created health problems and eventual death for many people and can be spread through sexual activities, blood transfusions, intravenous drug use, breast feeding, etc. Not all of the awareness that they had was correct or up to date but at the very least they had awareness. This means that the newspapers, radio programs, TV, schools, etc. had done their job of bringing awareness of the problem but awareness by itself doesn’t change behavior and lead to the necessary results to move forward and fight this terrible pandemic. Our real challenge as HIV/AIDS Consultants is to increase the knowledge of the participants, help them gain the skills and knowledge to make an informed decision about changing their behavior (and hopefully influence their family, friends, etc. to likewise change their behavior) and give them the incentive to do so. I will return to behavior change in a later email and explain more about how it is absolutely critical that this happens for the battle against HIV to be won.

One final thought to leave you with is about smokers, their reasons for smoking and reasons to not stop. I know many intelligent, well educated and informed people who smoke. These people have most likely read the packaging on cigarettes that says smoking is bad for their health, seen ads on TV and in magazines to quit smoking and lead a healthier life and maybe even known someone that has died of cancer or other smoking related illnesses yet these people continue, why? They are aware and informed but this on its own isn’t always enough to change their behavior and thus later we will return to the topic of behavior change.