Welcome to Malawi! My New Home

I just finished my first week in Malawi and I’m really excited about how much I learned in such a short amount of time. I’m based at the Baylor Center for Medical Excellence in Llongwe, Malawi – it is a hospital that specializes in pediatric HIV care and it is affiliated with Baylor School of Medicine in Houston, TX. It is the best HIV caregiver for children in Malawi and ever since 2006 it has been affiliated with GrassRoot Soccer. This is an exciting partnership for GRS because it gives us the opportunity to reach more children and get more testing done by using the established “Baylor” name in Malawi. Everyone around here knows Baylor very well, many because the hospital has saved someone in their community or family, so people are very open to GRS when we say we’re working with Baylor. I’m especially excited to be working with Baylor because it gives me the opportunity to see the medical side of HIV care firsthand. By working and spending time with all of these doctors who are so passionate about pediatric HIV care I think I’ll be able to learn so much more about the whole process.

The Baylor program is also amazing, and exciting for GRS, because it has many innovative ways of thinking of testing and treating HIV patients. For instance, Baylor has initiated this “door to door” testing method that actively goes and seeks out new patients to test for HIV. This has been extremely helpful because many local families do not have the resources to travel to distant locations to test, they also are sometimes scared to be seen at a clinic for stigma reasons or they are just too intimidated by the possible positive result to go out and test. Baylor has found that going door to door around communities has encouraged more and more people to test. The great thing about the door-to-door testing is that Baylor has allocated a certain number of HIV counselors; some are actually GRS coaches as well, to follow up on any patients who have come up with a positive test. This way the patients can be told about the importance of adhering to a regular schedule of ARV’s. I’m really excited to learn about this whole process, and hopefully see how effective it is in person one day.

Last Saturday, I got the opportunity to participate in Baylor’s “Teen Club” program. This is a program that runs every three weeks for children who have already been exposed to the HIV virus. The program gives HIV positive children the opportunity to rally together and spend time in a strong support group. This is important because most of the rest of the community may discriminate against them for being HIV positive. By spending time in this environment the children learn a lot about themselves and actually end up having a lot of fun with their new friends. The program is also supposed to help the children recognize the importance of adherence to their medication (for ARV’s to be successful the adherence rate needs to be over 95%). This is where GRS comes in – our GRS coaches direct many of the activities run during Teen Club. These coaches are recognized role models to the kids in the communities, and therefore when they discuss the importance of taking ARV’s the kids listen up. Watching the coaches work with these children was amazing. The coaches are such an inspiration for the work that they do -- they have absolutely no reason to wake up at 7 am on a Saturday to help with events like Teen Club, yet they come back every week for the sole purpose of helping these children. Because of these coaches, Teen Club runs smoothly and all of the under-appreciated HIV positive children in attendance have the time of their lives doing the GRS activities.

As much fun as the event was, I have to admit that it was also very hard at times. After spending so much time learning about the HIV virus and what happens to HIV positive kids over the course of our training with GRS, it was pretty overwhelming to actually meet an HIV positive kid for the first time. I remember just looking at the first kid I saw and feeling this numbing sense of sadness for him. The chances are the kid did nothing to contract HIV, we learned that 95% of the kids in attendance at Teen Club became HIV positive through their mother at birth or because they were raped as a child – knowing this and then spending time with the kids might have been the hardest part of the whole process. After a while, I realized that there were many reasons to be happy about the whole day. The kids may be suffering and in pain from the ARV’s, but Teen Club gives them the opportunity to spend time with other children with HIV and appreciate the fact that they still have a life to live. One of the worst stigmas with HIV is that your life ends as soon as you contract the virus. Maybe back in the day before the birth of free ARV’s this was true, but nowadays children can live a full life if they adhere to a regular schedule of taking their meds and their bodies stay strong. Ultimately it was impossible to stay sad for too long when you saw how happy the kids were. Pretty much all of them were laughing, talking and joking around – once again proving that they are a million times stronger then I could ever be. Next time I’ll be sure to take some pictures and share them on this blog, it really is a cool day.

This weekend I’m going to Lake Malawi with my two housemates and some other people who I don’t really know yet. Should be a good time, if you have any free time go to Google and type “Lake Malawi” into the images section, pretty impressive.

Cape Town

Hi everybody, I wanted to share this post a couple of days ago but the internet has been pretty poor recently so I'm finally ready to share it now. I'm in Malawi now so be ready to check in soon with my updates from my new home!

Its already been two weeks since I left Boston for Cape Town and in these two weeks I’ve seen a wide range of scenarios that have really left a deep impression on me. For one, the city of Cape Town itself is amazing. I would say that it really isn’t much different from most American or Western cities insofar as it offers a lot of high-end entertainment/food/hotels etc. There were many moments in my Cape Town visit where I really felt like I was in some amazingly beautiful tropical location like Barbados or something. My six months in Senegal last year conditioned me to think of Africa in an entirely different way, and I think the reason for that is the unique nature of Cape Town and South Africa in general. As far as I can see South Africa is split between the extremely rich and the devastatingly poor, and this disparity is particularly relevant to big cities like Cape Town and Johannesburg. On the one hand you have some of the wealthiest people on the planet enjoying 5 star everything and on the other hand you have some of the poorest living conditions in any society anywhere in the world.

I was struck by this disparity more than ever yesterday when GrassRoot Soccer took all of us interns to the largest “township” community in Cape Town. The township is called Kayalitcha and it houses just over a million people from all over South Africa and sub-Saharan Africa – migrants looking for a taste of the inordinate amount of wealth that exists in some parts of Cape Town. Most if not all of the Kayalitcha residents live in a 6 by 6 shack made partly of wood and partly of tin. Each shack is forced to welcome 8 or 9 people each night, with everyone scattered on the floor trying to find whatever warmth or comfort they can. As you can probably imagine, the conditions in these shacks are unspeakably inadequate and against any sort of human rights questions that you may have. Running water is hard to find, with most families being forced to walk across the vast township to simply fill up a bucket for their family. There is no electricity in these shacks and the majority of the toilets are made up of shallow man made holes in the yard – these holes are too shallow to hold too much human waste but unfortunately most families have no alternative so they are forced to deal with whatever diseases and viruses that these outhouses may carry with them. The more I learned about these townships and the more I saw, the more I kept asking myself

How can anyone live in a place like this? How can anyone be happy in a place like this?

And the answer, unsurprisingly for most of you, is that more and more people are deciding not to live in these conditions. Crime rates and suicide rates have skyrocketed in the past couple of years, ultimately making Kayalitcha one of the most dangerous communities in the world. One of the men I met in this community told me the most amazing story which I’ll share with you all – this man was an ex convict and a major criminal in Cape Town. From the age of 5 he carried a gun and was involved in armed robberies. He had been arrested three times, all for armed robbery counts and after the third arrest he made the decision to change his way of life (something that most criminals around here do not realize until its too late). Today, this man, is a respected member of the community. He just started a tour guide business that enables him and his friends to show tourists around Kayalitcha, which in turn allows tourists like myself to get a glimmer into the township way of life. It also allows him and his friends to make a living outside of crime and do something productive for the community. He was a truly amazing man and thinking about his life after he told me his story while watching him play around with smiling township children was a really jarring experience.

Shortly after this eye opening experience, GrassRoot Soccer decided to take whoever was interested for a brief shopping mall on the waterfront in Cape Town. Many of us, myself included, were leaving the following day for our various placements so the mall trip group was big. Most of us just needed adaptor plugs, an extra sweater, some books or other simple things that might be more expensive in Malawi or Kimbereley, South Africa. Ultimately it was hard to find these things in this particular mall because everything inside was too high class for the simple things that we were looking for. This mall had LaCoste, J. Crew, Polo Ralph Lauren and Woolworths but they had nowhere to find cheap books or simple sweaters. This mall would put any mall you’ve ever seen in the states to complete shame. In addition to all of the high-end stores, the mall was full of incredibly gourmet and expensive restaurants. Even the bathrooms were gorgeous, which is not something you say everyday.

As I was walking through this mall with my new GRS friends, I couldn’t help thinking back on the conditions I saw in Kayalitcha. I spent the rest of the night trying to reconcile the two Cape Town communities and to be quite honest I haven’t found a reasonable explanation in my head, maybe I never will. The American equivalent to this situation in Cape Town would be if David Beckham’s mansion were next door to the homeless shelter in South Central LA – total poverty living next to disgustingly gluttonous wealth. To close, I’ll mention a brief conversation I had with one of the US embassy members, an American who had been living in Cape Town since the end of Apartheid. I brought up all these issues with him during our conversation and ultimately he ended by saying that he could not believe that these township inhabitents had not started a total rebellion against the wealthy Cape Town residents. He was saying that if he lived in Kaylitcha, he would have a hard time believing that he wouldn’t resort to crime, protest or rebellion in some way – what other option does he have?

I also wanted to take advantage of this internet session to post "Lusaka Sunrise" -- this was a video made by a former Grassroot Soccer intern and it's supposed to encapsulate the GRS mission pretty succinctly and effectively. It takes place in the capitol of Zambia, Lusaka, and it stars a lot of Grassroot Soccer staff members.

Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyplef2Hi6Y

Landed Safely!

My seemingly never-ending journey from Boston to Cape Town finally came to a close this morning. The past two days have been incredibly intense -- 7 hour flight from Boston to London, followed by a 12 hour layover in London, followed by a 12 hour flight to Cape Town -- but as soon as I got in the taxi destined for our temporary hotels I knew that all the travelling was worth it. The 15 minute drive from the airport to the hotel reminded me of all of the different aspects of South Africa that made it such an appealing destination for me. On the one hand you had these beautiful mountains (Table Top mountain, Lion's Head mountain and Devil's Peak mountain -- all three are one day hikes, something I will definitely be doing at some point over the next 12 months), then you had this incredibly gorgeous ocean and then in the middle of it all was Cape Town. A beautiful city. But at the same time, it was hard to ignore the masses upon masses of shacks alongside the road that made up a part of Cape Town's township area. These houses are inhabited almost exclusively by black South Africans and other immigrants who live in absolute poverty. The shacks seem to be made out of a mixture of tin, metal and whatever they can find to patch up all of the windows/ceilings. The whole thing was a pretty immediate reminder of the type of poverty that exists in this otherwise amazing city.

Obviously I don't know much about the city now, but I'm really looking forward to hearing as many details as possible and maybe visiting some time soon.

Not sure when I'll have the internet next but make sure to write me emails and check out this blog!