Butha Buthe Children's HIV Testing Event

This past week really sucked. Period. Three months of work had come down to a week of hectic planning in order to make my Children's HIV testing event a success. So here friends, is the story of the last couple of days and the agony it has caused me.

Let me start with the Wednesday before the event. I finally met with Standard Lesotho Bank and get a big check for 10000R for the event. It was two days before the event and I was still balancing large finances so it was quite frustrating. Talk about down to the wire. 10000R is only 1000$ but that goes a long way in Africa. But, anyway it worked out and was happy for that bit of good news. Little did I know that everything was about to get a lot worse.

Thursday: arrived at Baylor and the guy who is to transport some of the larger equipment arrives early. I kind of use him as my chauffer, and we drive around the city to get a bounce castle, lumber, brochures from the ministry of health, a generator and a stop off at the hospital for some information. So he was pissed off at me for using him, so I told him to scram and come get me later that day. I realized that I didnt have enough toys for the event, so I drive to South Africa... thankfully the border was fine and go on a shopping spree there. Thankfully that didnt take too long (yes I'm complaining about buying toys here). I arrive back at the Baylor centre and me and my chauffer pack up all the equipment for the event... 500 HIV test kits, lumber, everything. Tsakatsi, one of the Mosotho guys I was working with and probably the only one that cares about helping people with HIV calls me up and tells me that we need to pick up the toilets from the DA's office, because shocking... they wont transport them despite the fact they said they would. Anyway, we unpack the entire car and they drive up to get the toilets. Meanwhile, I stay behind to finish off some stuff. We drive up and dump the toilets off at the doctors house (imagine a few large port-o-potties sitting in your front yard, not that nice of me but i was desperate). I decide that its a good idea to leave the toilets there because its raining and I head back to Maseru. I get a message that the shirts have been delayed until 11pm, so I think this is fine, I'll just pick them up when I get back. 2 hours later I'm at Baylor finishing off some things. I get a call and the shirts are again delayed. More work and packing up things. 3am rolls around and the shirts are still not done and I am tired so I take a nap.

So after 2o minutes of sleep I was awaken by the german t-shirt guy on the other line. "Zee shirts are done". Of course I had no idea who this was and had to quickly realize that I needed to drive back to Butha Buthe as soon as possible. I told him I would be there in 15 minutes and whisked off to the place. I got there to a grumpy German couple. They showed me to the garage they kept the shirts and I quickly pounced on them. They were still hot from the press and I stripped down and put one on before heading back to Baylor. I call Tsakatsi and told him I had the shirts. He needed me to wait for him so he directed me back to Baylor, where I sat there waiting as the sun came up, knowing that I should be using this time to be sleeping or driving, not waiting around. Tsakatsi pulled up on his motor bike and we sped off to Butha Buthe, two hours away. The drive was pretty painful, hoping that I wasnt going to fall asleep on the ride up, hoping that Tsakatsi wasnt going to sleep either and crash infront of me and wishing to the gods that the event would go smoothly . We arrived at the hospital not long after 7am and parted ways. I went to the District Administrators office, where a day earlier he had promised to rally up 30 offices worth of cars in order to transport the volunteers. Of course when I arrived, he wasnt there. The bitch. And when I enquired where the transporation was, I was pointed to a small truck. Thanks a lot. Anyway, there was too much to worry about so I jumped back to the hospital and explained that hopefully more cars would come and pick up volunteers but I had to do other stuff. I arrived at Megan's house and piled up the required equipment... a port-a-potty in her lawn, a bounce castle, testing equipment, etc. I couldnt store it anywhere else simply because the school had been locked the day before and they didnt want us disrupting beforehand. Anyway, we tied all this stuff to the car and prepared for the bumpy trip to the event site. Of course the port-a-potty slips in its position and starts to topple over. Megan starts honking her horn at me, her following behind in my sedan. I of course think she's telling me to step on it... so the thing just about falls off till I realize whats going on. John (he works at Baylor with me and is helping out) and I jump out and he fashions a tighter hold to it using an extension cord. All the while I'm thinking: "THIS IS THE WORST DAY OF MY LIFE", fearing a port-o-potty spilling across the highway, no transport available for the volunteers, and being unable to get the event going, all with having driven over 6 hours that day and having slept twenty minutes. John tried to comfort me, but I was still pessimistic. Anyway, we manage to secure the thing and we head off to the event. The day before, of course, it had rained, and the event is literally the most rural place I have ever been. The school is on top of a mountain and that road to that mountain is ridiculous. I spun out my tires and almost ended up in a creek and that was before we even tried the ascent. We go straight up this hill, rocks falling everywhere, and somehow we get up there. Of course when I pull into the grassy hill, I get stuck. The kids at the school notice that there's a white guy in a large van with a bouncy castle and a toilet and they all come running. The car does not move. For fifteen minutes I am spinning these wheels with 400 African children staring at me. I stopped. "This is going to be a bad day"... now I can't even make it to the event site! I ran off to find help and managed to gather up all the materials.... and by "managed to gather" I mean told the kids at the event to carry up as much as they could, so it was a stream of little worker dwarfs trying to do this. Meanwhile, the DA of course cuts his promise short and delivers three cars and the gas was inadequate for the generator used for the PA system (did I mention that this school had no electricity?), so I speed back and gather up some gas (they dont sell gas cans in lesotho, I had to empty out water bottles) and talk with the volunteers. We hire a combi to take all of them, but of course it takes forever to come. So I pile in as many volunteers I can from town and we come back. I arrive back at the event an hour and a half later (I'm trying to paint how rural this event is... imagine the smallest town in Northerne Lesotho and then drive another 30 minutes straight up a mountain and that would be it... I'm pretty sure I was the first white person to see this place). I had told Megan to basically run the show... make sure that things were being set up. And when I arrived. Things were going well. Tents were up, the DA and his office, all the sponsors, counsellors, testors, children, chiefts, etc. were there. Somehow this place exploded to 2000 people, all running around. It was a success!


I saw a glimpse of hope and things started getting underway. An officer from the National Aids Commission steps in and we start to organize the opening addresses. John sets up all the equipment and then the MC who didnt show up to the event was miraculously replaced by someone. I guess the positive thinking worked out because all of a sudden the speeches were made, people were listening, dancing and singing went underway and the kids were playing their games, and people were lining up in droves to test for HIV. I'm not sure how to describe how the crowds were, but it was crazy. I pull out a balloon to hand to a kid, and literally I was trampled by hundreds of little hands and feet to grab at it. Good thing I didnt have a doll or anything or I would have been killed. It was tough because there were so many kids who clearly never got toys and we were trying to give them out and entertain them and they were mostly interested in getting as much as they could. I mean... if i were eight, I'd be in the same boat.

Anyway, I just wanted to let everyone know that basically it did feel like a bad ass to have an event, for a people you dont speak the language, on top of a mountain all organized by myself. I was very much pleased with the turn out and in fact, the idea of the event was quite original. Normally we do soccer events, but those often draw older kids... here we were able to get a few younger ones that I think will really be affected by the way in which we ran things. During the event I was running around trying to fix things and make sure things ran smoothly. Lets just say I've emotionally blacked out the event. There were so many people screaming at me, people demanding money, fixing problems that I'd rather not relive those hours.

Ok, and now for the rants:
So what happens at these events is that you give out t-shirts to people who test for HIV and who help out with the event. We had the shirts stored in a room so people couldnt get their grubby hands on them, but what happened was when I left any person who thought they deserved one, snuck in there and took one. The testers from the NGOs and hospitals took stacks of these things right from under my nose and gave them away to their friends. I found a woman passing out shirts from one of the testing tents. She gave two to a guy just sitting there. "What are you doing!?" I screamed at her. And I grabbed the shirts from the man. "What in god's name do you think gives you the right to take shirts away from people who are testing for HIV? Why do you have two?" ... "Well this one is for my driver." I felt like punching him. I felt like punching everyone. People would ask me literally every 5 minutes for a shirt, and we had run out. The event was several hours long so I apologized a hundred times. People hounded me all day, for a dumb shirt. I pulled the t-shirt off my back twice and was half naked during the event because people were being so demanding. And so here is my two cents: THIS IS WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOUR COUNTRY, LESOTHO. YOU ALL CARE ABOUT A DUMB SHIRT RATHER THAN THE F****NG HIV/AIDS PROBLEM THAT IS KILLING YOU.

Sooooooooooooooooo.... the whole day was a success, but in between was a disaster. Even afterward, we couldnt get the kids to leave because they were having a great time, just dancing around and playing games. However, I did scream at literally everyone there.. little kids, old grandmothers. I hope to never see any of those people again, especially the government I worked with. Speaking of government: so because I was dealing with thousands of dollars and had no help in planning whatsoever from Baylor, I was juggling the budget to see what we could a lot. The day was supposed to be on Saturday the 22nd. We asked the District Administrator to attend. He told us that he would provide transport if we could switch the day to a Friday. Great we thought. We have a huge organizing committee that needs to get up there as well as over a hundred volunteers that need to get 30 minutes away from town on top of a mountain. So we changed the date and he promised us to release the vehicles from thirty departments that we could use. The day arrived. He provided 1 car that could fit 4 people. Two hours later, he provided 2 more cars.
So that's wonderful, you clearly can't add and are rude enough to be late about it. So I had to spend my own money to rent out some taxis to transport the volunteers, who by the way, since they were late, did nothing but complain. Then we asked him to provide transport back, which he didnt so I had to pay for that myself. At the event, he brought his entourage of like 50 people, all of whom took a shirt, and then ate all the food, and left the rural Basotho people who came to test for HIV with nothing. WOW. GREAT JOB. Way to steal all the food and t-shirts and do NOTHING for your community and have a 22 year old from Canada pay for your complete incompitence. ASS.

Oh and now for my rant about Baylor. If you're reading from work, stop.
Each event gets 10000R for a testing event. For some reason Baylor puts it on itself to spend 6000R to "help Stuart", which means paying all that money to drive up half of the Baylor staff to see the event. Of course, I didnt get to use this transport for the volunteers and had to dish out 1000R for them. Then at the event all anyone did was eat the food and scream at me for not getting a dumb t-shirt. And then they left early, before the event ended so I couldnt use the transport back for the volunteers as well. Then the financial director tells me I'm 4000R over budget. Well, no. You spent 6000R on something that was completely useless, frustrating and disheartening to all the hard work I did. So not even my work is helping me out. Sometimes this place just sucks.

Okay, i warned you that this would be a rant. What I have been up to since finishing:

Well because I completely neglected the rest of my life, I spent the weekend resting and cleaning and generally enjoying the days off. This week has started the intense camper recruitment for the patients from Mafetang, in Southern Lesotho. I had been doing this the last two months, but the problem is that these kids are hard to find, lots have defaulted from their HIV treatment, have no phone numbers or addresses and just dont come to the hospital. So me, a counselor, a nurse and an expert patient have been driving out to find these kids. Yesterday we were able to get four extra... its actually kind of hard. We arrive at one place and the kid is at school (which is good I guess) but the mother is not there... she's at a funeral for a week. Or we arrive at another home, and the mother isnt there either. She lives in South Africa and only comes home for holidays to see her kids. We ask the older sister to sign for the kid. Its been actually kind of fun driving around and getting to know the nurses... theyre really fun and they appreciate when I sing along to the radio, give high fives when we find the kids, or when I tell them about America. Today the car broke down due to an overheating engine and the whole bottom of the car fell out from underneath from driving on the rough roads so they were all trying to be supportive in my cursing ways. Lets just say they learned some new words. We're a real team and it'll be over soon. But as I was saying its really interesting to find these kids. We find out where they live. Then drive up some road. Then we scream out the window to see if the people walking around know them. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. When they don't, they direct us to the local chief. The local chief either knows, directs us to a house that can direct us, or directs us to another chief. Its all kind of inefficient, but the system actually works. One that I did want to mention was when we went to the chief to seek out this one girl. The chief called me lazy, so we decided all trek to the house together and see if we could find this girl. We found the aunt at the house and started talking to her. What had happened is that the girl stopped taking her medication because her mother told her to, even though she wanted to keep on it. She couldnt come to camp because a requirement is that you have to be on medication to go, but we wanted to stick around and see what was up. The chief starts screaming outside and finally the mom arrives. Turns out the mom had to decide about taking care of her sickly mother or her kid, and the grandma. The kid then comes walking in, and we all sit there, as Sesotho is thrown back and forth, telling this woman that the kid will die unless she makes time to get her medication. Its so sad to think that a mother would do this, but honestly its so hard to put myself in her shoes. She just sat there and let four grown women yell at her about her kid and she knew she couldnt do much to help... this is how poor these people are... they cant afford to walk to the clinic because they dont have the resources to take away from working their houses and transport costs too much... and people just dont know how bad HIV can get because the kid looks healthy when they are on medication. Anyway, the story had a happy ending because this morning we found the women in the line-up to reinitiate her daugther on treatment. Sometimes yelling works. Another few: We arrived at one house and the boy said he didnt want to go: he was going to initiation school. This is a six month long retreat in the mountains in preparation for his circumcision. He will not being taking his medication. He will get pretty sick during this time but hopefully he'll be sick enough to realize that he needs to take his medication for the rest of his life. Another one: her uncle kidnapped her from her aunt and is in Jo'burg. She has Stage Four HIV (full-blown AIDS) and the family is almost certain she is dead. Although I think I'm helping, camp may be the least of these kids worries.

ok, enough of an update. hope everyone is well, sorry for sounding jaded.
love,
stu