Making Progress!

Lumelang koafela!

I hope everyone back in the States is enjoying the summer heat! I’m currently sitting in my house with two sweaters on, so feel free to send some of that heat over to Lesotho. It’s the middle of winter, and we recently got some snow! I live in the middle of the mountain, half way between the peak at the top and the river at the bottom. So we only got freezing rain, but the peaks just above us got a nice layer of snow! I have to say, I was kind of missing the Albany snowy weather where you could snuggle up in your blankets and watch the snow whirling outside with a mug of hot chocolate. But it was very cool to see the clouds pass over the peaks, first covering them completely, and then passing over, leaving a layer of snow behind. I was watching from the window of the clinic, next to a very much needed electric heater.

The last couple of weeks have been really productive! I’ve been at site, only leaving every other weekend for grocery shopping. It’s really amazing how much longer veggies last in my house when it’s basically the temperature of a refrigerator as compared to the summer months when veggies went bad in four days. I’ve had a cucumber sitting around for three weeks and it’s still cool as a well.. a cucumber! Although now that I think about it, I may end up feeding it to the pigs. Three weeks might be bit long. Anyway! (That’s another thing I love about living rural, no food waste! The pigs are always hungry).

At the clinic, we’ve been starting up several projects. The first is an in-clinic survey for patients to fill out when they arrive. It is taking place for the entire month of July. The point of this survey is to get demographic information about what types of people access the clinic. For example, what age range is most likely to access the clinics, from which villages? Which gender is most likely to come? What service are most people using at the clinic? Things like that. We’re hoping to understand which demographics need tailored services or more targeted information about what the clinic provides. So far, the biggest discrepancy I’ve seen is gender. Men just do not come to the clinic, and this isn’t specific to my village, it’s a Lesotho-wide issue. Men don’t feel comfortable being seen by female staff, or they don’t have time during clinic hours to come in. I’m hoping when the month is over and we’ve completed the survey, we can see this data and start some programming related to men’s days at the clinic, which will be staffed by bo-ntate feela (only men). Perhaps it will take place at nights once a month, re tla bona (we will see)! It all depends on the availability of the male staff at the clinic.

Another trend that we knew was going to be present in the data was that youth hardly come to the clinic. Preventing new cases of HIV in adolescents is the primary goal of the framework health volunteers (me) work with, so I was anticipating this trend. I’ve mentioned an adolescent health corner a lot in the goals we’re aiming to achieve at the clinic, and we are starting data collection on this goal as well. I’ve been going on outreach to nearby villages with two other staff members who work with community tracking. We’ve been meeting with youth ages 10-24 in different villages throughout the whole month of July. Things like weather conditions and miscommunication prevent meetings from going as scheduled, so there have been some setbacks. But so far, we’ve had five community gatherings in four different villages. We’ve been explaining the point of an adolescent health corner to youth, and then giving them surveys which show us youth attitudes towards the clinic and barriers to access. So far it’s going well, but some of the youth really don’t take it seriously, which makes sense because they’re kids! Still, sometimes it’s discouraging when I see a survey in which the participant has checked off every single box including every age category (I mean maybe this kid is dealing with a Benjamin Buttons type situation, who knows). But the fact is, almost every youth so far has indicated that if there was a place for youth specifically to go for specialized health care, they would go. So that’s great, and it shows how much of a need for it there is. It’s very likely we won’t be able to have a “fully functioning” adolescent health corner anytime soon, because we’d need additional staff and resources (including a building) for that. But what we can do, is staff the clinic maybe twice a month on Saturdays for youth-only care. Again, it all depends on the availability of staff and their willingness to come in on the weekends. But everyone working at the clinic all agree that this is a really important issue, and youth need to feel like they are being given specialty care.

Another exciting project that is in the works is a YOLO club! YOLO stands for youth optimizing leadership opportunities. I am working with a friend of mine who works at the clinic as a lay counselor on starting this up. The point of this club will be to empower youth, give them leadership opportunities, teach about life skills, and sexual and reproductive health. We’re hoping to talk to youth once school starts up, and depending on how many youth are interested, we may have more than one club tailored to different age groups. It just so happens that volunteers (including me) in the Southern districts of Lesotho are organizing a three day YOLO camp over Independence day break which is in October. So we’re hoping to start up this club before the camp so we can bring some youth to it. I also am really hoping to incorporate a general board type of elected system to the club to increase sustainability, and for youth to understand what having a leadership position entails. Having a President, Vice President, and other leadership positions in after-school clubs is really not common in Lesotho, or at least in my village. So youth don’t get to learn that skill of leading peers, planning events, and so on. This was a skill that was really important in shaping my leadership skills so I’m hoping this can be a part of the club! But really, I’m getting ahead of myself because we actually need to create the club first. But I have a feeling a lot of students will be interested!

So things are going great at site, and my counterpart for GRS and I are planning on starting our first intervention for primary school girls at the beginning of September when the students return from winter break. So there are a lot of things to look forward to! The other REALLY exciting thing I’m looking forward to is that my family is visiting in less than a month! Barnetts reunited! Hooray! Cannot wait to see them, and I’ve been counting down the days since March, honestly. So I just have to get through the rest of July and keep working hard at site, and then I’ll get to go on an awesome vacation with the best people I know. Next week is the King’s birthday in Lesotho, on the 17^th. Every year, King Letsie III picks a district to visit for celebrations and as luck would have it, this year he’s coming to Quthing! It just so happens that I’ll be away from site for an in-service language training in Quthing town, conveniently where the festivities will be taking place! What a coincidence. Hopefully I can take part in this cultural event a little bit, even though I have to be at this training as well. I have a feeling our LCFs (language and cultural facilitators) won’t mind letting us go from classes a little earlier than scheduled to party with the King (at least I hope!).

I want to end the blog on a more serious note, because I know I write a lot about very positive things. Besides my own personal setbacks, I don’t really write a lot about generally negative things about Lesotho specifically. A lot of this stems from the fact that I really want to paint a positive picture of a country that many people may have negative perceptions of. I’ve especially tried to avoid the trope of a “poor” country, because sure, Lesotho is economically disadvantaged, but they are rich in so many other ways, which I hope I’ve been able to get across to you, the reader, through my experiences living and working here. Though I love Lesotho and the people I’ve worked and interacted with, obviously there are faults, as there are in every country. So remember to take this section with a grain of salt, and I also want to stress that these are my experiences specifically, so I cannot speak to other communities in Lesotho or other volunteer experiences. With that said, I have been going on outreaches with clinic staff, as I’ve said. Last week, we went to a village that is about an hour/ hour and a half walk (depending on your pace) from the clinic to talk to youth there. It’s a bumpy walk, and remember we live in mountainous terrain, so it has literal ups and downs. After we booked it there (because we were late) I was so exhausted, and kind of dreading the walk back. We spent the most of the day on the outreach and got back to the clinic right before it closed. It never occurred me how long an hour and half walk to the clinic really is. I got home that night and really reflected on how tired my feet were and how I did this walk once. Just once, and I was already so exhausted. The craziest thing is that this isn’t even the farthest village in our catchment region. Some people have to walk hours and hours just to get health care. Now add in the fact that they may have to walk those distances in pain, sick, or pregnant. Some students have to walk that distance twice a day, five days a week, for the entire school year, just to get education. The infrastructure that exists in this area is so poor. The clinic has monthly outreaches where they go to these far villages and provide outpatient care to citizens of those villages, but even there, there are so many setbacks. Like, the clinic isn’t staffed enough, the driver is late, the clinic is low on stock of medications, there are too many people to see everyone. Even just seeing the disparity in this between rural and urban areas is even more jarring, because people who live in urban areas can access these services with ease.

Health care is a human right. Education is a human right. And yet, to achieve these, citizens in my area of Quthing have to walk extreme distances with any number of setbacks. In emergencies, people have to first get to the clinic just to have access to an ambulance who can bring them to the hospital. Patients who are on treatment for HIV have to go at least once a month for refills, and patients who are newly initiated on HIV medications have to go back more often for side effect management. I don’t think it really dawned on me how long an hour and a half walk to the clinic and back really is, and experiencing that in good health just made me really consider why I’m here and who I’m working for. But even so, there’s only so much I can do as a volunteer, and infrastructure is a much bigger issue that I can hope to tackle. Experiencing this and thinking about it critically has really motivated me, more than I was before, to do my part in making my village a more equitable place. I hope I can do this, even a little during my time left as a volunteer.

So I’ll leave you all with that.

For now, sala hantle!