South Africa and TCE it is!

Hi all! I hope you have been following the updates on the school’s site, you’ll see that we are really getting on with the community work. As mentioned in my earlier post, we’ve already started with community work in the neighbouring villages and I am involved with the HIV/AIDS education activities. I got involved with this community activity because I was already interested in learning more about HIV/AIDS and working in the related projects of Humana. In the meantime we've received the available projects and positions, have studied them and have made our choices! So I decided to go to South Africa because they offered a very interesting HIV/AIDS project called “Total Control of the Epidemic” (TCE), an awareness and prevention programme which has a more practical approach to the fight against the epidemic. I will tell you more about it later but in the meantime you can read an overview on the Humana website if you like: http://www.humana.org/TextPage.asp?MenuItemID=48&SubMenuItemID=116
I’m actually the only one from my team going to South Africa, but I will be working with other Development Instructors (DI’s) from other DI schools so it’s an opportunity to meet other volunteers. My other team mates are going to Malawi and Mozambique, to projects such as Teacher Training Colleges, Child Aid, Farmer’s Club and also TCE.
From now on we will be training more specifically for our projects. We’ll still be working as a team, but we will have additional individual assignments related to our projects, for example I just completed a research assignment looking into the problem of AIDS orphans in South Africa, especially the stigma they face, and what is being done and what more can be done to support these increasing numbers of orphans. FYI, there were estimated to be around 1 200, 000 AIDS orphans in South Africa in 2005 (UNAIDS). There are many more unimaginable figures which you just wouldn’t believe (just Google)! It’s good to know that I will soon be doing something, anything! about the desperate situations of affected people, but for now I have to learn a lot. I’m already getting a lot of training through the “Mini-TCE” activities which we are carrying out over here as part of the community work. This involves going door-to-door providing information to people about HIV/AIDS and explaining the importance of getting tested and where and how they can get tested, distributing free condoms and providing proper condom-use demonstrations. In the beginning it was quite difficult because we were not sure how to approach and speak to people or how people will respond, but people here are quite open to talk about HIV/AIDS and are very grateful for the work we are doing.
It is great to be doing something for the community and learning a great deal from it. The activities in the communities really bring us closer to the people, although people are very open and friendly here anyway and it is easy to chat to anyone on the street.
For now, it’s about time for a break :-) We have this weekend off (normally we only have one day in the week off). We’ll be going down to the Grenadines for some sun! It has actually been raining a lot on the main island, more than usual for the dry season and we are not getting as much sun as usual, but it’s still warm ;-) so no complaints. Then it’s back to another week of fundraising next week (yey!).
Take care all.