1st small victory!

I just spoke with the HR director at the Hyatt in South Africa and they started an HIV testing campaign in their workplace this month! She was happy to coordinate with me to make sure the information is being reported correctly, etc.

In addition to working on testing kids in schools, I am working on the workplace testing aspect of the overall campaign. The goal is to test 2 million workers in their workplaces by June and it's probably the part of the overall plan that is furthest behind.

Here's some info about why businesses should test (beyond it being the right thing to do) and why it's so important to the overall campaign.

For anyone doing business in South Africa, 10 – 40 percent of the workforce is likely to be infected with HIV. Mining, metals processing, agribusiness and transport sectors are most affected by the pandemic, with more than 23 percent of employees infected with HIV/AIDS.

Companies are directly affected by lower productivity, greater absenteeism, vacant posts, the need to retrain and rehire workers, reduced productivity due to staff inexperience or illness, loss of morale among employees, poor labour relations, less reliable supply chains and distribution channels.

On a general level, HIV/AIDS is affecting business by causing markets to contract or prohibiting them from growing. HIV increases poverty which lessens the demand for goods and services. Additionally, a high number of students drop out of universities because of their own infection or to care for an infected family member. This has a negative impact on buidling an educated workforce in South Africa.

Businesses are in a unique position to tackle this crisis because business has direct access to those most affected.

If a company is willing to test, we hook them up with an NGO to do the testing, the pre and post test counseling and referrals to health facilities so that workers who test positive can get the appropriate follow up treatments.

Good for the Hyatt and nice to end a Friday with good news.

Technological Challenges to Moving to South Africa

Tackling the technology in South Africa is tricky.  In case you were wondering, these are the things that have gone wrong so far.

1.  Bank of America won't let me log on to my account because they want me to verify a text message to my cell phone which I deactivated for 3 months. Hopefully I still have a few dollars but who knows.   
2.  Facebook got a little freaked out and made me do a multiple choice quiz to identify pictures of my friends. I passed with flying colors. 
3.  E*Trade is sure that I have been hacked and won't let me day trade, drastically reducing my revenue source during this volunteer stint. 
4.  My kindle is broken and I need Amazon to send me a new one but of course I have to mail it from America and have it returned to America. 

Some of these things could be solved on the phone but the internet connection is not good enough to skype and of course there are no phones in the office.  However, I just got my blackberry yesterday so I should have everything sorted out in short order!

What I'm doing here

I arrived back in South Africa on Tuesday morning.  After spending a couple hours regrouping in Pretoria, Becky and I headed west to Mafiking, the provincial capitol of the Northwest Province.  The purpose of the trip was a meeting with the Department of Health, Department of Basic Education, Office of the Premiere and several other governmental and NGO representatives to discuss the beginning of testing for HIV in secondary schools and evaluate their readiness to begin testing in schools in February.  The schools campaign is an important part of the greater HIV Testing Campaign aimed at testing 15 million South Africans in a year.  The South African government has set this goal and has both dedicated an impressive amount of resources towards achieving it and harnessed the power of the active NGOs in the country to make clear that this is their top priority.

It's estimated that 95% of children in schools are HIV negative (many children are not in school so I'd imagine the rate of school aged children is much higher) but testing in schools is more than just identifying HIV positive students.  The counseling component is equally important so that these kids can stay negative.  For many kids, this will be their only interaction with health care personnel and people who know their status are much more likely to engage in healthy behavior and stay negative.

The meeting was fascinating and a little overwhelming as the magnitude of the task became clear.  We also managed to have a little fun since one of the main hotels in town was a casino.  We played blackjack and obviously they increased the table minimum when they saw Americans coming.  Fortunately, the increase was to 25 R which is about $4 a hand! 

Back in Pretoria now and excited for the weekend to catch up on sleep a little.