Year 2

Hello, first time I have written since September, it was really busy between september and december before I went home. We concluded our program in the community. We did 137 health speeches in the 19 primary schools in Mugulama and almost 6,000 students with less than 15 years of age who heard, for the first time, explicit information about HIV and other sicknesses. Do not get me wrong, do I think most of them retained the information they heard? Prolly not. But you have to start somewhere. We went to 90 religious institutions and about 4,000 people heard our health speeches and everything went really well; we openly talked about condoms, fidelity and abstinence within those institutions. At the hospital, the ladies who are volunteers in our group visited the ladies in the morning who weigh their babies and they explained the method of transmission of PMTCT and, since they are having sex...for reproductive purposes I am sure, how important it is to know their status and talk to their partners. At the hospital we talked to over 2,000 women in a one month span. Finally, the volunteers went to their respective markets and talked with about 3,000 people over 37 days.
So that sums up our first year project. We were able to buy new bikes and repair old bikes of all my group of volunteers. The volunteers and the community seemed to enjoy their interactions and since the end of July we have had over 1,600 HIV tests. This is an incredibly large amount, given the demographic, economic and cultural situation of Mugulama.

On a personal note, my second year has brought about new challenges, both in terms of my work and my continous integration into my community. I would like to move beyond my work with the volunteers and began building a foundation with those people living with HIV. My group is doing a lot of training this year to build their capacities and hopefully will become an association with the government. But I am not sure many people who are starting treatment or just tested positive will have their fright disappear within their conscience in the next 9 months. So I have been thinking of using this year to build my volunteers a community and health education center, where many programs will be dedicated to HIV information and community mobilization. For those people in counseling and treatment at the hospital, it would be good to begin getting to know them on a personal level, so I can understand their situation in a more sympathetic fashion and to help the integration of a new volunteer next year, who will prolly be working with them more than I. At a training by Peace Corps we were taught a technique of farming called perma culture. This is based on the idea of digging extra deep into the ground and planting certain foods in a particular fashion to yield a large amount of food from a small area. This is important because the patients can make this type of garden, enabling them to stay closer to home and save their energy. Most of these patients have farms far away and use a lot of energy, usually working on empty stomachs while taking ARV's, and many times these farms do not yield an equal amount of food for the time spent cultivating. Myself and our social assistant from FGH, Natalie, are going to use a little bit of money were are receiving from FGH to build a smal perma culture pilot farm just outside of the grounds of the hospital. We are going to plant food that is vital to the nutritional intake of the patients receiving treatment. We are also going to teach some of those who would like to know, how to make fertilizer out of material that is free and available in our community. I have already begun a small farm at my house and began making fertilizer 4 weeks ago. Hopefully it will be ready in about 2 months.

Like I began to say early, life in my community still brings about some odd and rather straining difficulties. I though my patience could be not be tested more, but the more I realize it, I still have a long way to mature, apparently. For those of you who know me well, I never really had patience. The humility aspect is also depressing. Being stared at or laughed at or embarassed is rather difficult sometimes, even for those of us who have a good sense of humor. The toughest thing for anyone to accept, especially men, is being corrected in public. And here, at the same as being the most famous person in your community, you are also a complete nobody within your structural work environment, i.e. ministry of health. I thought I would be seen more as a community member than sometimes I feel. Don't get me wrong, my neighbors and colleagues and the leaders of the community embrace my presence and love the occasional normal talk and it is never an atmosphere of abnormalcy when I am with them. But others, it is still a foreign idea that I live there, among then. My buddy Jimmy, sitting here at the computer next me is trying to reassure me that it is just they joy in hearing a foreigner try to speak their language, and i guess he is right. But I just like when my old neighbor comes by ever morning and says the normal morning compliments in the local language and then she walks away like it wasn't anything special. It makes you feel good. Like you belong. But I am sure it is just a feeling telling me there is more I must learn and understand before I come to conclusions that could damper my mood and mentality.