This is Africa!

Today I had particular exposure to – this is Africa…. I went to pick up my work permit.  I thought the hard part had been done with the application, and I had confirmed before I went that it had been approved.   How wrong I was!

First, I was directed to Room 117, where amazingly there was no queue, they confirmed the work permit was ready and then sent me to Room 101.  Room 101 was piled high with stacks and stacks of yellow folders on the floor on the desks.  It was so full that at first I couldn’t work out if anyone was actually in the room, following a tentative hello from myself someone popped up from amongst the stacks.  Apparently I had to give him my receipt and my passport and then go and wait in the queue for Room 103 to pay my fees, he would find me in that queue to return my receipt.  So back down the narrow, dark and busy corridor to the queue for Room 103, I was feeling a bit heartened, so far it hadn’t taken too long and the queue for Room 103 had been much longer when I’d come to apply for the work permit. 

Eventually I got to the front of that queue, paid for my permit and was directed to Room 119….. Excellent, I thought, when I saw there no queue. Except it turned out that the door was locked which meant that no one was in, still I was hopeful they had just gone out and would be back shortly, I had seen lots of people heading in and out of their offices locking the doors behind them.  So I waited, watching a lady walk up the corridor carrying my file including my passport, try the door and then walk off again, saying that I should wait … This carried on for a long time, in fact, until it was lunch time.  I had to do something, so I headed down to the far end of the corridor to the man in the room of files and explained my problem, he took me to Room 107, to see the lady who had been walking up and down the corridor.  It turns out that the one person who can sign work permits was in a meeting (and then probably going for lunch).  Did I have any options I asked, well I could wait, or I could leave everything and come back after 2pm, at which point hopefully the person who could sign the permit would be back.  Having already been waiting in the dark narrow corridor for an hour and a quarter I didn’t really fancy waiting out lunch time as well.  So I headed back to the office really hoping that my passport would stay safe and get back to me.  About an hour and a half later I headed back to Room 119… oh dear a queue, luckily my man from the filing room was just coming out and let me know that I didn’t need to queue here as the permit had already been signed, so I could just go to Room 107 to pick it up.  Yipee!  So after visiting 5 rooms, a lot of queuing in a dark corridor I now have my work permit! 

A new office

Due to the new project we launched recently, and the activities to support it, the CHAI team in Swaziland has been expanding.  Our old office had enough desks for 7 people and there were 10 of us working there.  It was generally okay as we had a conference room which we could use as a place to work, it did become a bit more interesting when we actually wanted to use the conference room for a meeting, that usually involved some convoluted musical chairs to sort things out. 

This week we have 4 new people starting, so something had to change.  Alison our Country Director has been working on new offices for some time, and when I arrived the leaseholder was threatening to offer the office to someone else if we didn’t move in by the 15^th July.  It is a new building and the offices hadn’t been fitted out when I arrived, so we really didn’t think it would be finished by the 15^th … we did hope that they would finish by the 1^st August though…… They haven’t, which means we moved into new offices that doesn’t have internet, enough desks and has builders apparently randomly drilling things, taking doors off the hinges etc.  The aim of moving in was to try and force them to finish things quicker than they may have done if we weren’t actually in the offices.  I’m not sure how successful that has been, luckily I have had a lot of meetings at other offices.  This offices will be a huge improvement once they get sorted, but this week is a bit of a transition week.  We are definitely going up in the world as we are all to get our own phone and extension number, rather than sharing 2 lines between the whole office (one of them being the fax line).

Trying to work with 4 builders and two drills in the area!  

Sibebe Survivor

This weekend saw the annual charity walk organized by the Rotary Club of Mbabane Mbuluzi, this involved 3,300 people walking, running and singing their way up to the top of one of the world’s largest granite monoliths.  It is kind of an interesting event in Swaziland as there isn’t really the culture of raising money for charity and generally when Swazi’s gets to the position where they don’t have to walk as a means of transport then they don’t do it for recreation.  This meant for most of our Swazi colleagues who came on the walk, the fairly gentle 6km hike was quite a challenge!

I live just off the only road to the starting point of the walk, on a normal morning I’d see two or three cars go by, on the morning of Sibebe Survivor there was a constant stream of fully loaded cars, buses and kombies (minibus taxis) heading down towards the start.  Mbabne is normally fairly quiet and we don’t really know what a traffic jam is, on the day of the walk there was a queue of traffic for about a kilometer before the start line and the parking area, it was great to see so many people out and participating in the event.   

If you want to know some more about the event and what the money is used for this takes you to the Rotary Club webpage.

http://www.sibebe.co.sz/index-2.html

A colleague of mine, Laura, designed and made our team t-shirts at her screen printing class, below are photos of the team at the start of the walk and at the top of Sibebe.

Eric or ‘just the intern’ as he has been known to describe himself took on the job of carrying our snacks up the hill.  Joe, who was organizing our team had very thoughtfully brought the snacks, but hadn’t thought through the container, he managed to pack them in a tub that wouldn’t fit into any of the rucksacks we had with us.  Well done Eric for carrying the tub all the way up and down the hill!

Laura then hosted a Sibebe Funday at her house to reward the ‘survivors’ with a braai and fun and games including a bouncy castle, a three legged race, egg and spoon race…..  Below is a very out of focus photo of one of the egg and spoon race heats.  I think I was laughing so much I couldn't hold the camera steady, the course involved running down the garden, through the bouncy castle and then back to the top of the garden again, you really got to see peoples competitive sides coming out!

Back to reality

After the crazy week that was the launch week, this week has returned to more of normality and no trips to the community.  At the moment is a relief but I’m sure I’ll miss shortly, as I don’t think I’ll have much reason for more trips as my role is primarily working with Clinical Lab Services unit of the Ministry of Health, which is based in Mbabane. 

This week has been focused on meeting with the key people in the lab unit to help me understand how they work and digging a bit more into the areas we have identified for support.  The one point that is becoming a common theme is the expectation that our support comes with funding attached.  Currently the whole of Swaziland is suffering from increasing disruption due to lack of funds from the government, therefore even though they need support in many areas their current burning platform is money to purchase reagents.  I have to keep on guiding the conversation back to areas I can help with, rather than things that are somewhat out of my hands….

Rest and Recuperation

After the crazy launch week, we were really fortunate that the Friday was a bank holiday to celebrate King Sobhuza II’s birthday.  He was the previous king who ruled from 1921 until he died in 1982, and negotiated Swaziland’s independence from Britain in 1968.  I hadn’t really realized that it was coming up, but luckily for me some others were more organized and arranged a trip to Blyde River Canyon in South Africa (apparently one of the largest in the world).  It was great to see some on the area near Swaziland, do some walking and have a very relaxing weekend.

Below are some views from our walk.

The Launch

It had been a very late night and a very early start for us all, the aim was to get everyone on the road at 7am so we could be at the site by 9am.  It did not start alarm’s not waking people up.  Then when we started to pack up the cars, the at our office wouldn’t let us out the doors with all the boxes and bags without a signed letter, despite the fact that they see us every day….  So everything was stopped while I got my computer out, wrote a letter, checked it would be okay and then dashed back to the office to print it!  While that was going on we also found that the minibus driver only had a permit to drive via Pigs Peak which is a takes significantly longer and a far more winding road than the other route, which would mean that most people were going to be even later ….

Anyway we eventually got on the road and could have a couple of hours to relax and then plan what we needed to do when we got to the site.  It was promising to see people when we arrived, as there was always the worry that no one was going to turn up!  We then had a frantic hour of moving some tents around and setting up tables for the information tent and for distributing the scratch cards and trying to encourage people to write on a Dream Wall which was aiming to capture and create a collage of what peoples hopes and dreams were for Swaziland in relation to the HIV epidemic.  There was an entertaining half an hour with the team trying to attach large pieces of cloth between two very old basketball poles and then pin all the smaller pieces of cloth to them.  Then even more of an initiative test to work out how we could keep the poles upright without the wind catching the cloth and blowing them over, there was a danger that it was going to become a dream carpet rather than a wall….  Luckily someone thought of tying the poles to the stage and we were sorted minutes before all the guests of honour such as the Minister of Health, one of the Royal Princes arrived, the President of CHAI etc! 

Waiting for the Guests of Honour to arrive

The event was very successful with a mix of speeches, entertainment and a quiz the scratch card raffle.  It seems that everyone in Swaziland is mad for free branded goods we had a few bandanas and t-shirts which as a helper I had to wear and the number of requests I had for me to give them to people at the end of the event was unreal.  However this mania for goods did mean that there was great participation when the Minister of Health did a quiz with questions on HIV with the potential of a free t-shirt if you go the question right!  

The popular gospel band Emagawugawu got everyone up dancing, including the Prince (the one in the red traditional dress) and his police protection officers!

The event has generated a lot of energy and the challenge is for the team at CHAI to capitalize on that and move forward the key projects. 

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 ....