I’m wrapping up my fifth month in Lesotho and am just now feeling like I understand the work I’m supposed to be doing and am becoming effective at it. This past week has been a hectic one, as I’ve been charting out my Q3 and Q4 workplan, but finally, finally, I feel like I’m getting somewhere. It’s frustrating that it’s taken five months to get to this point and I wish I had done this kind of planning three months ago … but at the same time, I don’t think I knew nearly enough back then to do it. Still not sure I do. To give you an idea of what’s slowed me down, here are a few questions that have been posed to me or that shed some light on what it’s like to work in HIV/AIDS in a resource-constrained environment that still bears a stigma towards this plague:
- What do you say to an HIV-positive woman who says her husband will beat her if she tells him of her status?
- Is it even possible to combat HIV/AIDS when the local radio stations run advertisements for herbal drug that cure AIDS?
- How do you handle a situation when the only generic drug manufacturer of a certain children’s drug decides to stop producing and it means that a 3 yr old child now has to take 5 tablets at a time, twice a day?
- When an infant’s HIV/AIDS test result can take up to four months to be returned, at which point that baby has probably died, where do you start?
- How can you provide life-prolonging ARV drugs to children when they can’t even afford the transportation to their nearest health clinic? Or when they have to walk 4 hours to the clinic? Or when the river floods and can’t be crossed for a month?
- What value do you put on life when the majority of your weekends are spent at funerals and in cemeteries that stretch for a mile along the road?
I know I don’t have all the answers and I probably never will. But five months on, I know there are solutions, imperfect though they may be.
