Preparation for the Launch of Max ART (Anti-Retrovial Treatment); For better health and zero new HIV infections

19^th July 2011

This week has been an interesting week, I have been taken off my main project to help with preparation for the community launch for this project.  It seems as though it has been quite a challenging event to coordinate as it involves so many different groups.  As it is a Swaziland initiative it needs to be seen to be lead by the Ministry of Health, but the key partners who were granted the funding are CHAI and a Dutch group called STOP AIDS NOW! who do not have anyone based in Swaziland.  This has lead to some interesting debates where things that the MOH and CHAI were really excited about and supportive of, may not be seen the same way in Europe by SAN!, which can make it very challenging to get even the smallest thing agreed to!

Also as it is a community launch so the aim was for the community to lead the organization of the event, however when we went in to go through the last details it was clear that not everything is quite as sorted as we hoped.  CHAI has agreed to fund the food for the event, it turns out that to cater for the anticipated 2000 people we need to purchase two cows.  It seems that as we are paying for these then the activity cannot be delegated to the Indvuna (the chief administrator for the region) so today (the day before the Launch) started with us getting up very early to view, negotiate for and purchase cows, negotiate the price for transporting the cows to the butcher and then negotiate the price for the butchery of the cows.  It now transpires that we have to get a representative to the butchers at 5am tomorrow morning to watch the butchery of the cow to make sure there are no disputes later about if we received all our meet!  You can see the photos of one of the cows we bought!!

Trying to Get away ….

Things are definitely happening in african time, we arrived at the location of the launch at noon hoping to check that the toilets had been dug in the right place (they were going to be done ‘first thing’)…. It hadn’t started yet and the tents were due to arrive at noon …. It’s 3pm and counting!!

Waiting for Tents

Well the tents eventually arrived at 4 15pm, then it was a race against the light to try and make sure they were up, in the right place before it got dark.  We stayed to make sure that the tents were at least up in the right place and then left to head back to Mbabne, to find out what last minute things needed to be done back in the office before the launch event.

There was lots of last minute preparation … such as stapling raffle tickets to the back of 2000 scratch cards which we had designed with questions relating to facts and myths about HIV!

Stapling Scratch Cards late into the evening ....