May 20: Week 2 of Classes Done!

It’s hard to believe that this trip is about 2/3 of the way over. Time has been playing its usual game, so it feels both like I just got here yesterday and also like I’ve been here for a month. I’m pretty torn between trying to get every last moment of enjoyment from this trip and starting to be ready to go home.

Today (lies, I’m writing this on Saturday, but for clarity’s sake, I’ll say ‘today’ because otherwise I’ll get confused) started off with a class at the Ekwendeni Clinic on the outskirts of Mzuzu. I originally thought we were taking a tour of the clinic, but we were receiving a lecture from the coordinator of their orphan care program. In my mind, that was better in some ways. The lecture was probably my favourite so far. Esther, the woman who runs the program, spoke so passionately about the effect HIV/AIDS has had on children in Malawi and what can be done to improve their circumstances. She’s also a really spunky woman. A particularly interesting moment was when she was talking about how things were before ARVs were funded by the Global Fund. She was spending $3000/ month to buy ONE patient ARVs, and eventually that wasn’t feasible for the centre anymore, so they employed the patient so she could buy her own ARVs. Not much later, ARVs were subsidized, but that woman continued to work for the centre, travelling around to advocate for education and testing for HIV/AIDS. Then Esther said, “And that was Maria,” and indicated the woman who had been sitting quietly in the corner throughout the lecture. That was the first time most of us knowingly met someone with HIV/AIDS, so I really liked how she introduced it. She told us many positive things about Maria and her work rather than introducing her as someone with HIV/AIDS: this is in line with what I’ve learned about all kinds of illnesses, where to remove the stigma, you need to remove the label (i.e. person suffering from schizophrenia rather than a schizophrenic person).

After the class, Esther offered us the opportunity to get tested at the clinic. Sadly, I didn’t realize that we could observe the process without getting tested, so I missed out on this part. I decided not to get tested for 2 reasons: 1. I don’t want to use the limited resources they have here when someone else could benefit from the test, and 2. While I know there’s basically no chance that I have HIV/AIDS, either a false positive or getting that news would be destructive to my mental health while on another continent. The students who got tested (10/18, I think) told me a bit about the process, and it sounded really interesting. There’s significantly more counselling here before/ after the test than in Canada, which I think is a detriment of the Canadian system. While we do have significantly fewer people testing positive, those people are likely still facing many of the same emotions as people here. To me, any incurable illness diagnosis should be accompanied by some sort of counselling; that just seems intuitive.

Once everyone had gotten tested, we split up in town and got lunch, though most of us ended up at the same restaurant, so it was another long affair. We didn’t get home until about 3, and I spent the following hours reading the book Natalee lent me and taking a nap. In the evening, we went to the ‘disco’ again. I considered not going because of how tired I was, but I was glad I did because I ended up having fun. Overall, the evening was less fun than last week. Partly, that was due to the demographic at the disco. This week, there were significantly fewer women, so we were quite a focus of attention. In particular, there was an older white man (old as in white hair) who just stood against a pillar, watching us as a woman…danced on him (there’s really no other way to describe it). That was really creepy. That being said, I enjoyed dancing again! Sally, Kelsey, and I headed home about half an hour earlier than everyone else since we were tired. In the end, that was probably a good thing because we’d left quite the mess in the main room, and we’ve learned that if we leave messes, Felita and Chancey (our ladies who clean and cook, whose names I finally asked last weekend) will clean them, so we try to avoid doing that. By the time we’d cleaned and gotten ready for bed, the others had shown up, so sleep was delayed until things quieted down again.

Overall, it was a really long but very interesting day.

-Jen