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 township
s 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 mis
conceptions and social intolerance of HIV/AIDS.
