Falling into Place
It seems incredible that we are starting our final week here in Swaziland – just as things are getting interesting! After a second meeting with the Ministry of Health, we have secured at least some level of funding for our family planning brochures from World Vision. We also developed a color version of the brochure and a poster version for clinics, just in case funding runs out for the brochures. We will be presenting these finalized materials before the Ministry on Monday
Also, our dipstick project has reached its (initial) conclusion! We have a finalized reading card ready to hit the clinic this week for testing! Also, we made edits on our liquid adherence charts and are going to be making a presentation about them (and the pill adherence charts) at ICAP this week.
The SOP is also coming along splendidly. I was a bit worried that we had no idea how to write an SOP and thus create something useless for the Ministry, but as it turns out, it is merely a starting point. Generally in Swaziland, people are fairly opinionated. But they need a starting point from which they can make changes and tailor documents to meet their needs. So, to aid in this process, we drafted an SOP of the process of job aid development. Hopefully, this will be a stepping stone to getting educational material in the country standardized.
Next, we will be meeting with World Vision, the Ministry of Health once again, and ICAP to get our materials printed and hopefully distributed – even if this does not end up happening until after we leave.
Over the weekend, we had the chance to go to Mkhaya Park. There, we had one very adventurous driver who took us right into the middle of a family of elephants. It was pretty intimidating to see them all up close and personal, especially this huge male who kept rubbing his foot and edging toward us. Here he is:
