par for the course

Written January 27, 2013

What a week!

I will never cease to be amazed at how many things happen in a weeks span here in Mozambique.

Now where to begin. . .

As you all may remember I was stuck in Inhambane City at the beginning of the week, finally making it home on Wednesday afternoon, with my new refrigerator in tow.

Thursday I was back on the job, going down to my one community organization for what I thought was going to be our monthly meeting. Unfortunately due to lack of communication, no one showed up, and the meeting was pushed back to this coming Thursday, the 31^st. I sometimes get very frustrated with things here, this organization is sometimes one of them. I put in a lot of work and effort to try to streamline our work process, stay more organized and become a more efficient organization. We make calendars, plans, have ideas for projects, and then there is no follow though. When this happens, and I call them out on it, there is a lot of “passing the buck” if you will, no one takes responsibility for their actions, and there is little to no accountability. This is something we are going to discuss in length next Thursday during our meeting. Hopefully some things will be straightened out. Stay tuned.

So after that failed attempt at a meeting, I headed up to the hospital where I have been working on registering patients for ARV and pre-ARV medications. This is not what I should be doing at the hospital, and have expressed it in length to my supervisors. So now we are looking for someone that I can train to do this work – thus giving someone else a job. During my meeting with ICAP on Monday, I laid out a few project ideas for the Peer Educators at the hospital.

I want to create a Moringa nursery in/around the hospital grounds. There is a lot of free space, plenty of water sources, and it is a great area to get information out to the masses. Next week I will also be starting a training with the Peer Educators about doing their field visits to those patients who have abandoned ARV treatments, and encourage them to get back to the hospital.

Later that afternoon we had a “Commit TARV” meeting, where the doctors, technicians and other hospital staff get together to discuss how to help people stay on their ARV medication, how to get more people tested, and how to help eliminate the stigma. The next time we have this meeting, I want to include some of my counterparts from my community organizations, seeing as they are the ones out in the community doing home visits and things. I feel it would help create a stronger bond between both hospital and community.

On Friday, I paid a visit to my other community organization, and talked with my counterpart about the Moringa nursery I want to start at the hospital. She has a really nice grouping of Moringa trees at her house, so she always has seeds. Together we planted about 15 that day to let them start germinating. We can plant them in the ground a bit later, once all the details get hashed out.

I also spoke with her about our project with Moringa Juice/Smoothies that we want to make out of seasonal fruit and dried/powdered Moringa. With the collaboration of this proposed nursery at the hospital, informational workshops/speeches given about the plants, and the Juice sold in town we feel that we can reach out to a lot of people about this plant. We also have the idea of making the juice for “Cha Positiva” a monthly meeting at the hospital for those who are taking ARV medication and living HIV+. It is a meting time for them to ask questions and talk about issues with their medication, its sort of a support group, but is run by doctors, which can be intimidating. So we were thinking that if we bring in this juice and have an informational session done in the local language, people may feel more at ease, and be a bit more involved in the process. Stay tuned for that one too.

So all of these work plans are coming together . . .hopefully many if not all will come into fruition.

Personal successes this week – I made calzones from scratch! Yep that’s right, I made the pizza dough and sauce from scratch, put in some cheese and some smoked sausages bought in Maxixe, and baked them in my dutch oven. Needless to say they were DELICIOUS! The next morning I had a cold one for breakfast thanks to my fridge. Yep. I had cold pizza in Africa. Boom.

Some other personal successes, I made a delicious stir-fry the other night, I am continuing to strengthen my friendships with the neighbors, I took Ceu (the dog) down to the lagoon, annnnnd have been putting together a small social calendar for the upcoming months. I find that it helps to have something to look forward to, the time passes quickly, and the next 18 months don’t seem so daunting.

I’m really looking forward to February 1^st when I can open the package my Aunt Maria sent to me! Ahh! Going to be so exciting!

Anyway, lots of work to be done this coming week. It was a lazy weekend around site, lagoon days, Mad Men marathons on my computer, and good food. Not a bad life here in Quissico.

Much love to all.

t