Give me some Alphabet Soup!
UNFPAFLASICAPCHAIWVM2MEGPAFSRPUHPU. Grammatically incorrect? Perhaps, but these letters have been the essence of our past few days (and will continue to be so, hopefully).
Our family planning brochure has successfully been translated and approved by the Ministry of Health! They want to be able to use it throughout the country at all PMTCT sites. The problem is that they are not going to be able to fund the printing of them. This is where all those letters come in.
We have been busy arranging meetings with several of these groups to gauge interest in the brochure. We really feel it would be beneficial to have this information disseminated throughout the country, as 40% of women of the age of having children are HIV positive.
We have also finalized a prototype version of the reading card to be used with the liquid adherence dipstick and should be testing it out on the expert clients soon! Job aids for this and the adherence chart we designed to accompany it are underway.
One new project that has come to our attention is through CHAI. The status of job aids in Swaziland is astounding. There is no regulatory body that maintains a list of what kinds of job aids are out there or how many of any given kind are in circulation. An effort is currently going on to create a database of all job aids in the country. We have been tasked with a branch of this project to create a Standard Operating Procedure for how to develop job aids in the country – quite a large task indeed. It is probably apparent by now how our work load has increased exponentially as the end of our trip approaches.
Last weekend, we crossed the border into South Africa to go to Kruger National Park. The park is about the shape and size of the country of Israel and has all sorts of wild life. In our time there, we only covered the southernmost quarter of the park, but we saw so many animals there in just two days, including what are known here as “The Big Five.” They are the lion, the leopard, the rhino, the elephant, and the buffalo. The park was mostly covered in low, brown grass, so we were able to see animals at greater distances (yay, winter!).
We also got stopped by the South African police multiple times to check our “boot” for, well, illegal booty, you might say. The whole trip was quite an adventure. Below is a picture of a friend we made along the way!
