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| View from my house |
Wow. What an amazing first week it has been for me
here in South Africa. After a few days of travel, I finally made it to Bulwer, the town I will be living and working in for the next year. I have the privilege of living at a bed & breakfast run by a very talented woman named Loretta. Loretta cooks amazing meals, tends to a beautiful tea garden out front of the house, and has created a lot of art work and sculptures within and around the home. Bulwer is a very rural town over an hour away from the nearest city, Pietermaritzburg. Bulwer is located in the mountains and can get pretty cold, but the view from my house is amazing. The clinic I work in is just across the road from where I live. The clinic is small and basic, but it seems to serve its purpose. On Wednesday, I visited the clinic for the first time with the program manager, Jonas, and met all of the nurses and staff. From Wednesday to
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| Medical Male Circumcision Clinic |
Friday we had 2 women from the CDC visiting the clinic to review our program because the CDC is a funder for the MMC program. We had a stakeholder meeting on Thursday with CMMB staff, the CDC, the DOH, and TB/HIV Care to summarize the goals of our male circumcision program, evaluate the progress made within this past year, and discuss further collaboration between our organizations to enhance the program. Being my first week of work, I found this meeting very beneficial. The MMC program has been operating for 1 year, but our clinic in Bulwer is fairly new. This Saturday, CMMB hosted an MMC program launch that introduced the new clinic to the community and promoted the importance of male circumcision for HIV/AIDS prevention.
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CMMB Launch Event
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The event was a great success and SO fun. As expected.... it started much later than planned because community members operate on African Time, meaning no one shows up until several hours after an event starts. So although the launch was supposed to start at 9:30, no one was really there until 11:30. Despite the late start, the event was very entertaining and informative. The launch featured dancers, a vocal group, a poet who preformed very powerful poetry on the issues of HIV, several speakers, and a local musician/DJ that advocates for MMC. One of the speakers was CMMB's Senior VP of Programs, Jeffery Jordan, who came all the way from Washington D.C. for the launch! I feel very fortunate to have arrived during this week to be able to meet all of the CMMB program staff and learn so much about our MMC program. This coming week should be a lot less hectic, but I am looking forward to learning more about the community, getting to know my co-workers, and really get to work on the MMC program!
