Putting the Z in ZA

I'm not sure why, but South Africans abbreviate their country ZA. I suspect Slovenia was quicker on the draw...

When we landed in South Africa from India, we ran into a bit of culture shock, The highway was smooth with little noise or dust and traffic staying on its side of the road. The group went to Rocky Road, a rural backpacker hostel, for our country orientation. After a few days of seminars, we visited the local townships where the students would work. The service project here is to follow hospice workers in the townships. Many of the patients are HIV positive, but with the new class of highly active anti-retrovirals treatments (HAART) it can be difficult to tell.

South Africa has the highest incidence of AIDS in the world, although India will probably pass it in gross numbers soon. There are a number of causes: extreme poverty, poor women’s rights, the legacy of Apartheid leading to slow public policy initiatives, and the strength of the economy regionally, which encourages a large number of men to migrate. One of the more powerful images of the epidemic for me was seeing a century old church graveyard doubled in size and nearly filled over the last ten years.

For the remainder of our time, we’re staying in Plett, a white beach town on the Indian Ocean that feels a lot like southern California. However, the students go everyday into the townships only a few miles away. There the living conditions range from lower working class to impoverished, sometimes euphemistically called informal housing. Most students seem to emotionally bond with the care worker they shadow. While they might complain about the slow pace of the work, they all seem to recognize how these women are able to make an important difference in someone’s life, often with very few resources of their own.