True Men

So far, all my posts have been about some pretty awesome adventures, mishaps and what not, but they only represent the happenings of weekends. For the other 5 days of the week, the QPID Bots team works 8 to 5 and I just wanted to share a little about the work experience which may not be as exciting as our weekends, but more valuable than any sort of sightseeing. I touched on all this stuff at the end of my first post but being here for a while has given me a better understanding of the situation and purpose of the organization I’m at.  Let me start with an overview of how everything played out. Brace yourselves (or skip over this one) for a more serious post:

The first time I heard of the position of cooperant with Queen’s Project on International Development was during frosh week back in 2009 where the club had a booth at an event that was meant to introduce us newbies to the various engineering related clubs and design teams. The thought of spending the summer working in a foreign country was enticing but it was a thought that was looking too far into the future and at the time, I needed to focus on settling into my new environment.

Second year rolled around and I decided to get more involved in clubs and really make good use of the opportunities. Becoming a cooperant for QPID seemed like a pretty big challenge but the summer experience looked too good to pass up. The project locations were Nunavut, Ghana, and Botswana and right away, Nunavut was eliminated because I would not have been able to endure a cold “summer”. I applied at the end of October 2010 and was thankfully hired for Bots after passing the application review, selection day, and interview.

November through to beginning of May was spent preparing for the QPID Botswana Project along with the 3 other cooperants (Isabelle (my cooperant partner), Chloe, and Lyndsay), the site director (Thomas), the project manager (Davina), and the rest of the QPID Projects team. Ghana and Nunavut have been long running QPID projects but Botswana was a new location and so no one was sure of what to expect which made everything a lot more adventurous and exciting. We arrived in Botswana on June 9^th, and started work on the 15^th.

Chloe and Lyndsay work in Kasane at a human rights organization by the name of Ditshwanelo and Thomas, Is, and I work at an HIV/AIDS organization based in Francistown by the name of True Men Trust. To understand the kind of work this organization does, you first need to understand the seriousness of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Botswana:

The country has a population of approximately 1.9 million (which is tiny considering its size) and more than 300,000 people are HIV+. Looking at percentages, 24.2% of the population between 15 and 49 years of age is HIV+. That is the second highest rate of HIV infection with only Swaziland having a larger percentage of a population that is HIV+ (keep in mind that Swaziland has a population of 1.1 million). Based on the visual below (which I took from Gapminder World by Hans Rosling), you can see that the life expectancy of the average Batswana dropped from 64 years in 1989-1991 to 49 years in 2002. 

In Gapminder, this visual was titled, "The rise, fall, and rise of health in Botswana"

2002 is when the government started implementing programs to deal with HIV/AIDS and these included PMTCT programs and subsidized ART. In fact, Botswana is only one of 9 countries in the world that provides above 75% coverage of anti-retroviral medication. The life expectancy is on the rise indicating that major steps are being taken to combat the virus but there are still huge challenges being faced. The biggest and most difficult to overcome is trying to change people’s behaviors and attitudes that are commonly associated with “culture” and that is one of the main focuses of True Men.

True Men currently runs three main projects, each with a global funder:

·      The PMTCT program is funded by Pathfinder International and targets the issue of mother to child transmission. True Men employs around 15 peer mothers who spend their days at various antenatal clinics around the city.

·      RTI funds a program targeting commercial sex workers and the truck drivers that commercial sex workers cater to. The reason for this is that HIV rates are much higher along trucking routes like the ones through Francistown and its primarily because truckers have to spend excessively long times on the road and waiting for paper approvals at borders and consequently entertain themselves with commercial sex workers.

·      BNAPS funds a program that targets the issue of multiple concurrent partnerships (MCP) and this, in my opinion, is the most important project. The reason for this is that many people here believe that it is culturally acceptable to be in multiple concurrent partnerships but this leads to dangerously large sexual networks where if one person contracts HIV, the entire network of sexual partners is affected.

At True Men, our work is very self-directed when we’re not working with the project directors. No one will tell you what you are supposed to be doing so we have to constantly remind ourselves that though no one is bossing us around, there is a lot to be done. We have a list of projects that we have in mind that would increase the effectiveness of the organization and we plan to implement them throughout the summer. Our first major assignment was to conduct workshops for the peer educators in the RTI and BNAPS projects. The workshops, which were conducted on June 29^th and June 30^th, were a great success and covered the topics of counseling skills, group counseling, professionalism, presentation skills, communication skills, sensitivity training, and mental preparation where each intern presented on a subject of competency. I presented on the topic of mental preparation and covered techniques to prepare the mind for a client meeting. We tried to keep the workshop as interactive as possible and included scenario/case study practice as well as a debate type exercise. The director had also asked for a post-workshop assessment and so that is what we had been working on this week. For our next assignment, we plan on working on an internal development project to bring transparency and structure to the organization. Having already visited antenatal clinics for introductions, we’ll also be starting some fieldwork of our own by accompanying peer educators and seeing how community interactions take place. Lets see how everything goes.

The guys that work at the headquarters. The ladies weren't invited to this photo shoot.

Ill start to include work updates at the end of my posts if anything super interesting happens. If you have any questions queries, concerns, let me know.