Show Me Swaziland!
I left the show-me state two days ago, and having flown through three continents, during which time we got to see a bit of London, we finally landed at a tiny airport (having no gates) in Manzini, Swaziland. During the short flight from Johannesburg, I was taken aback by the beauty of the barren land below me – miles and miles of rolling, grassless hills with different sized patches of trees hung like ornaments on the dusty terrain. Our final destination: the Baylor International Pediatric AIDS Initiative Center of Excellence located in the capital city of Mbabane. We had landed around the time school had let out, and saw many small children bundled up in the Southern African winter, carrying backpacks and running down (and sometimes across) the streets. There were several small, one-room houses, open-air fruit stands, clotheslines swathed in multitudes of colorful clothing, and bright red dirt roads.
When we finally reached the clinic, I was greeted by a sturdy two-story building with a nice waiting room, several well-equipped examination rooms, and laboratory facilities – and our room just 30 seconds away: our home for the next two months. This trip to Swaziland is a part of the Global Health Technologies program at Rice University in which students learn about the status of healthcare across the globe, specifically in developing countries, and work in groups to develop simple devices that can be used in different locations to improve the ease or quality of delivered healthcare.
We look forward to sharing our experiences here is Swaziland!