The Waiting Game

Hello friends. A few people have been writing to me asking me what the heck I’m up to over here in South Africa, other than traveling around and laying on the beach. Well, the answer is waiting. Africa AHEAD, the NGO that I’m currently working with, has been gaining a lot of traction and attention over the last three months and there are any number of projects that could take off at any moment. What that translates into for me is the need for patience as I wait to hear where I might go and what I might do. In the meantime, however, I’m keeping busy with a number of quite exciting projects.

For instance, Juliet, the executive director of Africa AHEAD, trained a number of community members in informal settlements here in Cape Town in the Community Health Club (CHC) approach almost two years ago. One of those individuals actually ran with it, successfully created a club of about 35 solid members and has now organized his group into a non-profit organization dedicated to serving the young, elderly and ill through a variety of services. As part of their development as an organization, they have created an Executive Committee to oversee their work and asked if I would be their Chairperson. I accepted and am now waiting to see where we will go with that. In addition, we are planning on training about 10 of their most active members in the CHC approach so that they can create mini health clusters in their neighborhoods.

On top of that, we just returned from a very exciting meeting with a pair of women that Juliet worked with a couple of years ago on a similar project. Well, they have created their own organization (for profit this time) dedicated to providing services to schools, clinics and creches in another group of informal settlements. What is most exciting for me is that they want to start a school health promotion program focused on safe hygiene (ie hand washing). When they mentioned that I could barely stay in my seat and offered them as much support as they want/need when developing this project. Just when my giddiness at that revelation was wearing off, they then mentioned that they recently implemented a community based research project in one of their areas and are looking for someone to help them with the data management and analysis. So next week I am going to meet with them again, plus four of their enumerators who have computer skills, and train them how to enter their data into a spreadsheet and effectively manage and analyze said data. They want to use this data to pressure their local government to provide services and support. What more can I ask for…school health and community based participatory action research!

Oh yeah, I almost forgot about our social capital research. We have developed a number of indicators that we would like to incorporate into our normal monitoring and evaluation and plan to begin pre-testing these indicators in the coming week. Once we refine these measures and are able to begin collecting this data, I belie

So, despite the fact that I’m not really getting paid for anything at the moment (despite a small stipend and a bit more for other projects like the training I co-facilitated a few weeks back and the consulting I did up north with another community), I’m loving the opportunity for growth and practical experience. What I do know is that my patience will pay off and that something more permanent will come as more and more people come to realize the strength and effectiveness of our approach to health and development. Mentoring, facilitation, capacity building, empowerment…these words are thrown around a lot in my field, but I truly believe that we as an organization are actually doing this, while contributing to reductions in preventable diseases like diarrhea. So I wait…but not idly.