August 29, 2014

I have a routine of waking up at 5:45am, turning on the hot water heater, and climbing back in bed until 6am when I start my morning routine. I was disoriented when I left my room because it was pitch black. The hallway or bathroom light stays on all night in case anyone has to get up and use the bathroom, but not tonight. I attempted to switch on the lights, but nothing happened. The power was completely out in the house. A wonderful excuse to skip showering, I crawled back in bed and slept for another 45 minutes.

Besides Setswana, we had one session on the overview of care, support, and treatment of HIV. The remainder of the day was filled with individual readiness to serve programming interviews, the third item in our trainee assessment portfolio. Treatment of HIV is crucial for survival, and anti-retroviral therapy (ART) has helped transition HIV from survival (weeks or months) to a lifelong, chronic disease. Just as important as ART is care and support. Care and support works to improve the wellbeing and quality of life of people living with HIV and their family during all stages of the disease. Being a life skills volunteer, I will most likely be on the care and support side of HIV work.

Programming interviews were completed individually starting after lunch and going every ten minutes. My official time was at 2pm; however, I finally went in at 3:10pm because they were so far behind. One of the life skills program coordinators completed my interview, and he was not a happy camper. He went through each question as though he was bored out of his mind and could care less about my response. I understand it has been a long day and that he was hearing the same responses over and over again, but my future site rests in his hands and I was hoping for a little more reassurance that he has my best interest at heart. He asked questions about my education and work history, how training sessions were, and any challenges I was experiencing. The interview was fairly quick and I was ready to go mingle at Patkay with my fellow volunteers.

It is obvious that people are becoming more comfortable with each other because the first conversation I walked into after arriving at the bar was about sex. For a group of health volunteers, this shouldn’t be a surprising conversation.

At one point in the night a local Motswana man in a red shirt came up and started talking to me and a group of female volunteers. The other volunteers quickly ignored him, but I didn’t want to come across as rude, so I entertained the conversation for a few minutes before continuing to mingle. Apparently the same man later went up to Emily, a friend of mine, and asked if she would get me to talk to him. Emily quickly told him to back off because I have fiancee. As she was telling someone else about the encounter with the man in the red shirt, this volunteer informed Emily that he was my Setswana teacher. Funny enough, Greene and the other Motswana both were wearing red shirts, but Emily thought she told off my teacher. It was one big, confusing mess and I was just glad Emily didn’t actually dismiss my teacher.