The first two days of our trip were spent in Knysna, a sleepy coastal town.
This was the academic portion of the trip where the public health students got some hands on experience with different organizations in the area.
Day one was split between Die Werkswinkel (The Workshop) and MAD About Art.
Die Werkswinkel (pronounced dee verks-vinkle) is project for the physically and mentally disabled, giving them full- and part-time jobs doing handicrafts that are sold at local markets and to other vendors, like schools. Men and women who would otherwise be generally shunned away from entering the workforce learn valuable skills and are empowered to take control of their lives.
We spent the morning their helping them out with their work. I helped sand benches so that they could be finished, like this:
In the afternoon, we went to MAD About Art, a day-care and after school program in the middle of one of the townships outside Knysna. If you didn’t already know, the townships are the shanty towns on the outskirts of cities where the blacks and coloreds (yes, they make that distinction here) were relegated in the time of apartheid. I’ll digress more on townships later, but basically, they are home to some pretty oppressive hardships on all levels, from socioeconomic to health and crime.
MAD gives kids from the township a stable environment in a place where chaos is the norm. From preschool-aged to middle school, children receive education related to personal health, which is generally HIV/AIDS related. It is estimated that the greater Knysna region has an HIV/AIDS rate of 25%. Aside from this valuable information, the kids here create a lot of artwork that is displayed all around the area that tell all sides of the HIV/AIDS story. Some art encourages people to get tested while some tells stories of dealing with HIV/AIDS, giving those in the community power to cope with living with the disease.
Part of our time there was helping out in the soup kitchen where local kids were being fed dinner and part of our time was spent painting and playing with the kids after they ate.
Day two was spent at the provincial hospital. These are state-run and are cost-free to patients who fall into a lower tax-bracket. However, they are violently understaffed, underfunded and overworked in these institutions. We took a tour of the hospital, which is something out of 70s movie. It seems like nothing there, medical instruments included, was made before Al Gore invented the internet.
The best part of this day was the afternoon which we spent in the HIV/AIDS clinic. The doctor who ran the clinic let us sit in on several of her patient visits that included a running commentary about everything that was going on. She had an incredible wealth of knowledge about HIV/AIDS, as well as TB. It was really awesome to get some clinical experience for my research this summer.
More to come on the toursity things I did.
