September

Hello. Life is going…along. I will be home December 8th until about the 6th of January. That should be nice. Doing my thesis proposal in Ile right now; eating wonderful meals with the German missionaries and Pamela and Riley my American colleagues. Work is a little slow right now, the group of volunteers just finished giving their health speeches in all the primary schools of Mugulama (16). And I have to say it went phenomenal. About 5 months ago I was telling myself, “If we can do 75% of all scheduled health speeches, I would be extremely happy.” Then, about 2 months ago, the preperation for the program-receiving commitments from school directors and gathering lots of other information from the volunteers-was going incredibly slow. In fact, I had to get on my bike and visit a bunch of schools to retrieve the necessary approval and information. Which I don’t mind, but it doesn’t do much for capacity building when I, as the facilitator, am doing the work I have relegated to others. This is when I said that I hoped 50% of these speeches were completed. So I went to the city in the beginning of August and did 51 different calendars; some for the schools and the others for the volunteers. I also typed up all the information they would be sharing with the students. I then handed out all the calendars to the volunteers along with some journals, pens, chalk and some other stuff for them to do reports and write in the classrooms (all paid for out of my pocket, because, what do you know, the American bureaucracy is pretty f’n slow). I explained to each one individually their responsibility and so forth.

When the project began, I was in Maputo, the capital of the country. So I was obviously worried about the logistics. Many of these volunteers do not have watches and still judge the time by the sun. But the program finished the school part last week and I would like to say that 100% if the speeches scheduled were completed. It was a very satisfying thing and I am very happy with all of them. In the next 2 months we have to give speeches in the churches, markets and hospital. But this was a very good thing for moral and my organization is very happy with the outcome so hopefully we can acquire some more resources for them to utilize. I was going to a couple schools to show support and mark off that the volunteers arrived, but then the President of the group would tell me I was doing speeches with him. I don’t mind this, I do it in the churches, but I am not scheduled to do them, thus it takes away from someone else doing them when they need the public speaking practice and to build their own capabilities and status within the community. So I stopped going to the schools, because I also had confidence they would show up.

About life, I have a cook now, which is nice. I never liked my old maid. It was a guy with a really large family. In his defense, he worked really hard and did everything well, but he was annoying and my general dislike for the actions of so many men here, influenced me a lot. For example, his wife who is in her mid-40s just had another kid about 5 months ago. It was here 9th pregnancy that went too full-term. Well, what do you know; it is difficult for her to produce milk. So they would ask me for milk, and I would reply that I pay the dad an extremely high monthly salary and he can easily buy it. But he would reply that that money is for cement to build his house. It was enraging. I may sound a little cruel, but you give in once and it is over for you. You have to say no to some pretty depressing things. Though I have enjoyed my time here, my soul has been pillaged of its purity. So, I was away from site for most of August doing work in other places. My maid wanted his full pay, and I refused it, so he left. It worked out well. So I asked the wife of the guy who built my fence if she wanted a job. So now she cooks for 5 days a week and does pretty much everything else. She is good and cooks very well. But now that I do not eat, I have a lot more time on my hands.

Killed another snake in my house. This was a bigger one, about 2 ½ feet long, but skinny. It was dark but with a bright green head and it was real aggressive. I was able to get it out my house before chopping its head off. I chopped it about 5 inches below the head and for the next 5-10 minutes it was still trying to bite me. So I picked it up with pliers and chased the kids around in the market. Unfortunately, I enjoy making kids cry with fear. I think has now become a hedonistic characteristic of myself.

We have a lot more workers in the hospital, so I don’t go there much. But many more people are doing tests, and of course, many more are positive. Through an evaluation of the environment of the country- meaning all external conditions that have an affect on a certain concept- I feel things will get worse before they get better. The economy has been expanding, on average, over 7% for the last 8-10 years. People have more money (men) and with better roads and travel opportunities, the virus is spreading at an enormous rate and hitting the areas of extreme poverty where women have no education, financial opportunities or an understanding of their human rights. And, again unfortunately, PEPFAR, along with other government educational programs, will probably not reach these areas for a VERY long time. Not only will more people acquire HIV, but since it is the poorest areas of the country, those families have an enormous amount of children, thus the orphan problem I believe is only in its infancy. PEPFAR is obviously the right idea, but unless other aspects of the society are changed (law, educational opportunities, sexual behavior, medical access), the American taxpayer is now directly responsible for the health of hundreds of thousands of people. This is because the people receiving treatment from PEPFAR now, and those in the future when many, many more people will be on treatment, we can never stop this program, or we will be responsible for the deterioration of the lives of those people on treatment, their subsequent deaths (mostly from tuberculosis) and all the orphans left behind. Every American taxpayer and voter should be thinking about what there politician’s strategy is going to be in the next 1-20 with regards to this program.

Well, I am going to get back to work. Take care.