cold and condomizing

This place is flipping cold! Get those stereotypes out of your mind that Africa is hot and searing, with the sun beating down on every living creature day and night. It ain’t so where I’m living, at bulls eye dead center in the middle of the country. In fact, I’m told that the Eastern Cape (the lower tip of South Africa) is covered in snow?? At any rate, for a native Southern Californian like me whose only exposure to freezing temps are skiing trips to Mammoth Lakes, living day to day in cold is a whole different story. For one thing, there is NO CENTRAL HEATING anywhere. The implications of this are vast. There is no way to get warm anywhere except under your blankets in bed. In fact, that is where many in the “highveld” (higher elevation areas, 4,000ft) go right after dinner, at 6:30PM, to bed! I have two thick blankets and a comforter on my bed. Last night, I dressed in thick hiking socks, thermal underwear, bottom and top, a fleece over the thermal top and I was still cold when I woke up! The first thing I did when I got out of bed this morning was to do 50 jumping jacks fast in my bedroom so I could function in the cold at some level. Then, my family and I found the water pipes for the house frozen, so no water at all this morning. My family owns one space heater that doesn’t do much unless you are three inches away directly in front of it. It seems hot water bottles are a must here. They are used to warm your feet when you retire to bed at 6:30 PM every night. Boy, I hope I have enough reading material to get me through a winter here.

At work, we have a moveable radiator-type thing in our office, shared by four staff that is ineffective as well. The best thing for warmth at work is waiting until after lunch when the bright African sun penetrates our side of the building windows and eventually warms up the office space to about 65 degrees. I think I’ll make an effort to get out to the projects more often when it’s really cold like today, because then I can warm up a bit in a car that has a HEATER. While I am moaning and groaning, though, there are thousands of families living through this winter in shacks. Made of corrugated sheets of steel, cardboard, wood, and mud, it is unimaginable to me how they get through nights like the ones we’ve had recently that included biting wind. I visited one of these “informal settlements,” as they are called, this morning.

I accompanied two staff members who train and support peer educators in the townships, villages and informal settlements. In essence, they recruit young, unemployed, undereducated, poor, women (many of them sex workers), educate them on HIV/AIDS, safe sex, life skills, leadership skills and support them with stipends, training and support visits. The objective of the peer educators is to reach out to their neighbors with this information and advice to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS. Today, we accompanied a group of 10 of them to a “shebeen.” This is a community bar and a “hot spot” for AIDS transmission. The 10 men we found there listened attentively, albeit a bit drunk. They asked questions about TB and how it is transmitted (TB is a common opportunistic infection associated with HIV/AIDS). They wanted to know how to tell if they had HIV or AIDS. And, of course, there was a lengthy discussion on the necessity of “condomizing.” It is always surprising to me how frank Africans can be when discussing sex, but still have so much stigma attached to being identified with having AIDS. This morning’s experience gave me insight to what is happening at a very grassroots level in unnamed, uncared-for communities to empower people to build a better life. It is a slow process but it is working.