Work is both very rewarding and emotionally draining sometimes. I have been able to finagle an office that has been described as a telephone booth. Maybe it’s the size of 2 telephone booths stuck together. It was an old storage space. I can’t fully extend my arms in either direction, but it’s enough room for a mini computer desk, a chair and hopefully a printer is coming soon. They’ve hooked up internet for me at work too, and I’ve been cranking things out. I’ve submitted 4 funding applications and have 2 more currently in the works. One of the applications was the first step of a 2-step process. It is a big money fund provided by a bunch of international donors including CIDA and USAID. I applied for 2 different projects and I just found out that both applications have been selected to submit full proposals. Yay!! It’s a small step, but it sure feels good to have even minimal success.
The hard part about work is the clients who come in. It is devastating to see what HIV is doing to people and families. I went on one home visit to a woman who was in the final stages of AIDS. She had 2 children, one about 6 or 7 years and the other about 2 years. The father had never been involved. She had severe thrush in her throat and was unable to eat or even speak much. She was also suffering severely from vaginal infections. She was just a pile of bones, really. We gave her some medications, but she died about a week later anyway. I have no idea what has happened to her children. When we were there, her sister shooed the children out of the room and the older one picked up the younger one and I could imagine that might be the future of both of them – children raising themselves. It was awful.
These heart-wrenching stories come to our office everyday and it really is hard to deal with. Just last week a month-and-a-half old baby girl was given to one of our staff members to take to an orphanage because her mother was dying of AIDS and literally going insane, and the mother’s relatives also had HIV and were unable to care for the baby. The baby is too young now to test, but if her mother was that sick, it is likely the child is too. It’s devastating.
I think that’s why I haven’t had much energy to update on a more regular basis. I get home and I’m just exhausted.
I took a bit of a break over the Easter holidays. I guess working for the Catholics has its benefits on holy days. I got the Thursday off before Good Friday and didn’t have to be back until the next Thursday. Before the third cooperant arrived, the two of us who arrived together went to
In general, it’s just taking me some time to adjust to everything. All my previous travels were only for relatively short spurts. It’s so much easier to deal with annoyances when you know you’re going home in a couple of months. Contemplating the next two years of annoyances gives them a different dimension. One of our big problems was the security guard at our “compound.” Soon after we arrived we noticed that he seemed to drink. A lot. Soon, he was drunk from morning till night. He had been asking us for money to repair a lot of the tools he used for gardening, and we found out later that he was giving us inflated prices and drinking away the difference. This made me really angry for 2 reasons. First, I really doubted that he was earning much money as a security guard. I knew that he had a family that he was supporting with his income. His wife was at home raising his children and he was drinking away any extra support he could have given them. What a jerk! Second, he is tiny man who I could knock down if I blew on him. How could he possibly provide us any protection when he can’t even make a coherent sentence? Thankfully after a lot of complaining, the landlord has sacked him and replaced him with reputable service from a security company.
Even though I feel better about my own security (and because we had a big lock installed on our door), I can’t say that I feel good about what happened. That guy had been working in our compound for years. I don’t know what will happen to him – can he find another job? What will happen to his family? Then there’s the whole issue of the need to rely on private security because police really can’t (or don’t) keep a lid on crime. And really, can you blame people who are fighting to survive for seeing an easy solution by stealing from those who, in comparison, seem to have unlimited wealth?
Although our house is (now) secure, and our area is fairly nice we’ve been warned numerous times from a bunch of different people that we shouldn’t be walking around after dark (which is 7pm). It’s just not safe. That is hard to deal with. I’m starting to get cabin fever. It’s not like we can’t go ANYWHERE, it’s just that we have to call a cab if we want to go somewhere. No evening walks, no seeing how things are at night first hand. It’s frustrating.
Of course there are the little moments of amusement that help to keep things from being too deep and heavy. For example, seeing a guy carry about 30 empty 5-gallon yellow plastic cooking oil drums on his head (and spread out next to his body). And there was a daladala (public transportation – kind of like mini-vans) that had a plastic blow-up seagull hanging from the rearview mirror. It was bobbing around while we drove. And one restaurant menu had a description of a fish burger that included “it has that great fishy taste.” It had sounded so good up until that moment.
So, that’s all for now. I’ll be writing more often, so I don’t end up with such long posts in the future.
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