DAC

I finally had a formal meeting with the District AIDS Commissioner (DAC) who is my work counterpart. I'm glad that we had a chance to meet and discuss possible work plans for my year here. I learned that there has been no funding from the National AIDS Commission (NAC) in over a year and that funding is necessary to complete work. His job is to go into the field and monitor the various Community Based Organizations receiving funding and being monitored by his office. But you need funding to buy gasoline to drive the cars to the villages far away from the District Assembly. I also learned that you need money to hold meetings. If you want to invite all stakeholders to come then you need to provide the people who travel long distances with lunch and reimburse them for their travel. So, we decided to focus on the work that we can do with limited funding and try to look for grants from other sources to cover any monitoring activities that we might like to do. Also, the DAC mentioned that NAC might begin offering funding again in a few months.

I also met with the head Community Home-Based Care (CHBC) nurse at the hospital. They hold clinics in different towns and villages in the district where they mostly distribute medications to chronically ill patients (i.e. people with HIV, asthma, cancer, etc) so they don't have to come to the district hospital which can be far away and cost a lot of money. By the way, health care is FREE here - even ARVs. So, the work the CHBC nurses do is fantastic, but I wanted to know how I could help them and the nurse mentioned something about nutrition. I thought great! I'd love to do anything with nutrition. So she said that the nurses (23 in all) would like to receive training on how to determine if patients are undernourished and also to offer cooking demonstrations similar to the one I mentioned in my previous post. So I'm going to figure out how to plan something like that.

It has been a while since I posted so I thought I'd just give an update of the past 2 weeks. I've been visiting a lot of different groups (both governmental and non-governmental) in Thyolo District that somehow work with HIV/AIDS. I've been to a cooking demonstration that was just amazing. Most of the cooking demonstrations that I've been to before focused on how to prepare one dish using locally available foods. This cooking demonstration had the participants bring ingredients from their homes and the nurse who was instructing the group showed them how to prepare foods in ways they might not have thought to before. They made juice from cassava leaves, doughnuts from cassava flour and eggs, soy milk and tofu, lots of tasty sauces and even a fruit platter. It was amazing.

I also met with a doctor at Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders in the U.S.). He said that MSF is planning on leaving Thyolo District in 2013 and they are in the process of handing over control of the HIV project to the Ministry of Health here in the District. He said that he's been trying to collaborate with the District AIDS Commissioner (DAC), the person I am working with, but he has yet been able to. He said that it would be really helpful if I could be the liason between MSF and the DAC. It is a difficult task but hopefully I can make some headway in the year that I'm here.

In other news, I went to an engagement party last weekend. It was fun and interesting. There was a lot of dancing and everyone gave the couple money and kitchen stuff. People really wanted to go to it, too, there were bouncers and they were actually kicking people out.

Oh, I found a cat! It's still to young to take home but it's at the house of a friend. She said in a couple of weeks it would be old enough. Not only will it be a great pet, but it will also kill any mice or bugs that come into my house.