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Building Blocks 1: April 30 - May 11, 2003 |
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This is to give you a brief update on my 12 days in South Africa.
I had an education and made great progress towards my goal of establishing a residential camp for children affected by HIV/AIDS.
On
the first day, I met with hospital HIV/AIDS psychiatric social work
clinicians from the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital. The hospital, in
Soweto, is the largest (they said) in the world. Their clinic involves
both well and sick children of HIV/AIDS infected mothers. It provides
services to the 3 to 4 million people of Soweto. "If we haven't seen
it, it hasn't been seen" seems to be their mantra.
One of their first questions I was asked was how I would follow up with the families after camp. I knew they didn't mean camp reunions so I asked for clarification. What they meant was visits from trained people to make sure that what was learned in the public health phase of camp was being observed at home. They offered a social worker from the clinic as a follow-up person to find out from the families what was needed to reinforce the camp experience and to keep the family whole and in good shape. That was when I knew I was on the right track!
Everyone I spoke to was helpful and informative--from the social worker/activist with scores of programs that she enables and then gets out of the way, to the basketball programs in Durban and Capetown that blend life skills into their practice sessions, to the mother in a slum who took three abandoned children into her home 30 years ago and now has 96!
Those that work with children do very little with them during the school holidays and they would love to have a reward system so their best could go to camp, which, they predict, would be very successful.
The overriding impression is that they have a level of expertise that is far above mine in the AIDS education part of the picture. I can bring the simple technology of camp to them. Together we could make nice music.
It was exciting and startling. After a break of 37 years from my first trip to South Africa in 1966, I felt for the first 3 days as if I were in upscale Fairfax County , such was the wealth and the absence of culture shock. I was staying in the Johannesburg suburbs and wasn't prepared for the spatial segregation and immense wealth and modernity of the whites. Picture a shopping mall with a wave machine suitable for surfing, a bungee style swing, and a climbing wall 50 feet high. And with very upscale, Tysons Corner-type shops.
I'm became better adjusted as I traveled to the former black townships, and gained a more realistic view of things. I spoke to white, black and colored (mixed race) people and got their overwhelmingly optimistic long-term view of their country and their unanimous view of ex-President Nelson Mandela as a hero and a saint.
As a wonderful postscript, I traveled in Botswana and Kenya too, and on my trip home, I was in transit in Johannesburg and was met at the airport by the two women from the Baragwanath Hospital HIV/AIDS clinic with whom I had spoken on my arrival day in April. They brought with them a budget for two 2-week programs, one for boys and one for girls, and a week of staff training. They also brought a site description of the perfect facility they had found for the camp. Also a name, Camp Sizanani (Zulu for "helping each other").
I caught them a little by surprise when I suggested that we could have the camp up and running by January 2004 (their long holiday). That is what we are planning now.
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