practicum and site placement

so this was a big week! first, all health volunteers had to do their practicums this week. practicum is a chance for us to practice some of the skills and ideas weºve learned about imparting health information to people. so we each had to find a group of people in the community, meet with them to sort of figure out how they operate, what they know, what they want to know, and then develop some sort of activity to do with them to impart some knowledge. many people worked with siblings or neighborhood kids. because i havenºt been doing portuguese class for awhile, iºve been meeting with an activist and going with him to meetings of a group of people living with HIV, so i did my practicum with this group. iºd been to several meetings and talked to the people (all but one are women) about their lives, problems, and what kind of information i might be able to bring them. these people are all taking ARVs, which is great, but one major side effect of ARVs is that they make you hungry, and they can make you sick if you havenºt eaten. and these people are poor, so they donºt have a lot of money to buy food, and thereºs been a drought here so they havenºt been able to grow as much food as they normally could (which would normally be a source of income as well). so they said that they would like more information on nutrition, so i prepared a talk on nutrition. i made a poster of food groups, but instead of using the traditional food pyramid i made a chart with "main foods" in the middle, and then "protective foods" (fruits and vegetables), "energy foods" (fats and sugars), "growth foods" (protiens), and "extra foods" (coffee, soda, cake). i liked this model because it put more of the emphasis on what foods are available (rice, bread and potatoes are all main foods which are relatively cheap and available here and do provide energy and some nutrients) and also grouped foods by what they do for your body. so i made this poster and then had pictures of lots of foods cut out, and had them stick foods on the poster in the right group, talking about why foods go in different groups, and how some foods are good because they fit in more than one group (like dark green leafy vegetables provide vitamins and protien and iron, or peanuts because they provide protein and good fats). then we talked about what foods are easily available, either in nature (you canºt go 5 feet without passing a mango tree), or cheaply in the market. we took off all the foods that were too expensive or unavailable, and they still had lots of foods that they found accessible, which was nice to be able to show because when i asked them before they said they couldnºt find anything. then i also told them about some tricks to add nutrients to their diet, like grinding up eggshells for calcium, or putting an iron nail in the cooking pot to add iron, or drinking the water they cook vegetables in to get the nutrients. they seemed pretty intrigued by these ideas, and overall i felt like it was a pretty successful practicum. iºm going to keep meeting with this group for my last two weeks here, and continue to bring them any other information they ask for. the experience of the concentrated practicum, as well as the experience of meeting with these people twice a week and talking to them about their lives and their problems, has been heavy and stressful at times, but also really instructive, thought-provoking, and hopeful in some ways. (i would like to note here that i didnºt come up with any of this stuff on my own, PC has given us a mountain of manuals, and most of the info i used for my practicum activity came from Where There is No Doctor by David Werner, awesome book).

the other big deal this week was that we all found out our site placements! they drew it out as long as they could, calling us up one by one in groups by province (so i found out first that iºm going to zambezia province), and handing us a folded sheet of paper that we couldnºt open. only once all 57 of us had done this did we open our packets to see what cities and what jobs we had gotten. it was ridiculously nerve wracking. so.....iºm going to quelimane, the capital of zambezia province. i will be living in a house, by myself, in a neighborhood in the outer part of the city. i will be working for ICAP (International Center for AIDS Care and Treatment Programs), an NGO funded by Columbia University. They have several focus areas, but the one that i will be most involved with is treatment adherence, making sure people on ARV treatment stay on it, and finding people who have stopped treatment and getting them back on. ICAP trains peer educators (HIV positive activists) to do this work, and i will be supporting a group of peer educators by being their link with ICAP. this is exactly the job i wanted (a current volunteer was visiting a few weeks ago who works for them and i heard about it from her), so iºm really psyched. thereºs still a lot i donºt know, but thereºs another volunteer visiting this week who works for ICAP also so iºll keep picking her brain, but iºm sure a lot will remain a mystery until i get to site (december 15th!). my job is also not set in stone, so there are a lot of possibilities for what kind of projects i could be working on, and that will just get figured out as time goes on. i feel as impatient as a 3 year old because i want to know as much as possible about my house, the city, my job, etc. but i only have 2 weeks left to wait!