Wednesday Whirlwind

 

          Wednesday was definitely a great day in terms of educational opps at the clinic. We started our day by shadowing the fabulously competent counselors at the ARVU, and my particular counselor was meeting with clients in groups of 4 in order to go over their medications and to meet with them for the first time after they found out they have HIV, I believe. Sometimes it was hard to see what was going on since the counseling was in one of the 11 national languages (!) and I got lost a bit.

          Some interesting highlights from this:

• The guy in the Barca jersey who was convinced that his positive HIV test wasn’t correct- he had previously been to see a traditional healer in his community, who gave him drugs designed to “clean” out the HIV from his sytem but instead made him really sick.
• The woman who said I was beautiful because I was white. It made me feel really conflicted.
• The guy who was my age, 26, and must’ve just found out he was positive and started taking ARVs but has yet to tell his wife. This opened up a huge discussion in the group on disclosure. They were talking about how hard it is to tell their partner that they’re positive, and this man said he was really scared to tell his wife. The counselor Niki suggested taking your partner to go and get tested with you, pretending like it’s the first time, so you can have the discussion in person when you get the results.
• One guy had a 2 month old baby and although his wife had tested negative, Niki said he needs to have both the mom and baby tested once the baby is 6 months, I believe.
• The aforementioned 26 year old dude had a CD4 (white blood cell count) of 2 back in November. 2!!! It’s a miracle he’s still alive, given that people can start ARV treatment when their CD4 is below 350.
• They discussed myths about HIV- one that I had never heard is that if you have sex with an old woman, you deposit the virus into her and you’re cured. Crazy!

After this, we headed to the ER and shadowed one of the sisters (nurses) who showed us what people come to the ER for, mostly due to infections. It wasn’t too busy so we weren’t in there long but it was interesting.

Following this we had a lovely chat with our supervisor Pam, who asked if we had ever taken public transportation before. Um. We said yes, and she called someone on the phone to ask about the bus system. Confused, we asked why we needed to know that, and she said that it would be easier if we could take the bus until we can drive the clinic car. Lauren practically exploded (it was awesome) and said we didn’t feel comfortable in any way taking the bus, and besides there isn’t even a bus near where we’re living. I find it hard to believe our sup didn’t know this. For some reason we’ve had to fight her on every little thing, especially the transportation issue. We were promised a car, so we’ve made her keep her promise on that, although its like pulling teeth. We also had to fight for separate supervision sessions with her as having it jointly doesn’t help anyone. She’s hard to deal with, but I plan on dealing with her as little as possible!

We also finally met the Executive Director by marching in her office and introducing ourselves since she had never returned our emails or reached out to us. She seems very nice, was really helpful and told us that we’d be working in the areas we were interested in (good!) but seems a bit scatterbrained. Ah well!

**Also, the names of people that I work with I’ve changed, so if they ever seem like soap opera names, they probably are!

After work, Lauren and I met up with Dillon again and he took us to see Somewhere Across the Border at the Market Theatre, which is in NewTown, or downtown Joburg. It was so neat- there was this swanky bar we had a glass of wine in before meeting up with Hamit and his British work friend. The play was about South African soldiers who were fighting for their country but conflicted about fighting against the blacks and going to the border of Angola and somewhere..The Afrikaans accent was seriously hard to understand so some of it was lost on me! Overall, super heavy, but it was awesome to be out and seeing theatre with new friends.