EIL Intercultural Learning

As our final week here in South Africa looms, special moments and memories have already formed. After spending time with the NGO, we then moved on the HIV and AIDS Clinic, where we are volunteering now. This is a day hospital with a special ARV unit (the medication taken when you are HIV+ and your CD4 count is less than 250). The unit is divided into sections where there are doctors, counsellors, nutritionists and personal advocates. All of them are there to help and support clients who have contracted HIV.

Today felt like an “Irish Day” here in South Africa as the sky clouded over with grey mist and heavy rainfall. However, this rainfall was a blessing for the South Africans as it allowed the reservoirs and lakes to fill with fresh water to prepare for the annual drought of the Summer to follow. People seemed quite happy with the change in the weather pattern from the last month of blistering sun and dry earth to a more damp, wet and cold atmosphere.

Just about three weeks here and wow, what a whirlwind it has been. We arrived in Cape Town to be greeted by a member of SASTS and were orientated at a volunteer house for one night. The big thing about South Africans is their sense of time, everyone is very laid back along with being super friendly. We then were transported to our host family where we were greeted by a big family of a grandma, grandpa, their daughter and her husband and their three young children.

This is my first blogpost ever, one of the many new things I am learning thanks to winning a travel award from EIL. Just one more week now before I depart for Nigeria to complete the second leg of the programme, having just completed the first. I am nervous and excited in equally healthy doses and can't help but feel compelled and inspired by the work that EIL have put into developing this incredible programme - the Global Awareness Programme.

I was delighted when I found out that I had successfully secured a position on the Global Awareness Programme with EIL. It was the only travel award that I had applied to and had felt really passionate about all the component of the award. I was excited about going away for eight weeks to South Africa and I knew working in a HIV respite centre and living in a township would open my eyes to various issues and allow me too consider a new culture and way of living.

Orientation  Arriving in South Africa was daunting; I honestly didn’t have a clue what to do really. But as I met the other volunteers on my orientation group I started to relax. The orientation week was a great way to see how truly beautiful South Africa’s landscape is and it allowed us to grasp a glimpse into the various different aspects of South African culture from it’s animals and wildlife to it’s scenery, history and enterprise.

After what was an incredible weekend we came back to the office on Monday for our last week, but there was zero time to get nostalgic about anything. My card teacher’s condition had deteriorated a lot over the weekend and his infection was getting worse, so he was sent to hospital again. But later on, the other client who had been catatonically depressed and hospitalised the week before, walked in with a big smile on his face. The turn around period for some people is quick. A lot of the clients made leaps and bounds in their health during my time at the project.

This week started by travelling to a town 2 hours away for a talk on ‘sexual violence’. It was really interesting and there were people from all over the world at it. One of the guys had written a book about HIV and Stigma so he gave both myself and Gill a signed copy which was nice. What was bizarre however was the venue. There were goats, impala, horses and a pot belly pig strolling around the grounds outside, in the car park, on the lawns; everywhere … I kid you not! Bizarre!

Because of the HIV workshop hiatus, myself and Gill have been meeting with some other organisations in Kayamandi this week. There is one that do fairly large scale testing, they went to section J of Kayamandi last week so we just missed out on that, but they’ve asked us to join them on another testing programme next week.