Huh.

I know you want to hear the story from the ran shack clinics I volunteered in, how I helped a women whose genitals had been blistered by the boiling water her husband poured on her in order to sterilize her because she had HIV, the women secretly bringing her baby into the clinic to get tested because she had breast fed him, despite having AIDS, so others in the community wouldn't be suspicious of her. But I can't tell those stories, because I only heard them myself from the hardworking doctors and nurses with the skills and certifications to treat these people. My story is one of shear frustration. Medication can make a huge difference. The advancement of medicine and the efforts of talented medical professionals is undermined by the social underwritings that take five steps back for every two steps forward. I spent just under six months in South Africa, and during my time there I worked with other university students as an HIV/AIDS educator doing outreach in the university itself amongst the affluent upper class, in denial of the prescence of HIV and AIDS with in the classrooms and lecture halls, and worked in the impoverished townships surrounding the western Cape.
But I lacked the skills to help the individuals with specific clinical needs. I was not in those operating rooms. I was outside, kicking the soccer ball with children that could sing to me in three different languages. And as their mothers and aunts and friends went into the clinic I wondered how many of these children would end up with aids, how many of them already had aids because they had been breast fed or worse raped. And as we handed out pamphlets and information on sex and HIV and AIDS, the kids taking the condoms to make water balloons, I wondered how many of them would grow up with the same misconstrued interpretations of sex, nasty misconceptions and social intolerance of HIV/AIDS.

Eye of The

Another, more compact, but just as comprehensive finales stand but 18 hours in front of me. Coffee, in its frozen sugared and creamed form comprises the majority of my caloric intake and i feel the insatiable need to write. There comes a point in every finals week when the realization that the depth and breadth of the information is just flat out too much- it becomes too overwhelming to really take on at all- the eye of the storm if you will. Because the initial energy was used up and as you study you realize just how much you don't know, sinking deeper into a little bit of despair you walk away, and wait for the finish line adrenaline to kick in so you can pull together what you can. In the eye of the Tiger.