Someone forgot to tell us to bring an inflatable raft!!!

After the worst (read wettest and loudest) thunderstorm I have ever seen I have managed to make it to the cyber cafe! Thankfully it only started raining as we had returned to PDH headquarters, preventing the drenched 'yovo' (white person) look! June is the rainy season and we have been told to expect much more of this!

Life here is definately interesting, whether it is the morning meetings at which all of the cases of the day before get presented and possible actions that can be undertaken are discussed, or visiting the poorest of the poor at their houses (concrete structures), even just getting some mangoes from a local vendor and witnessing the activity on these busy red dirt streets is exciting!!!

On my first day of work I visited 4 women living with HIV, today I met with two children at their school. The third woman I met yesterday, Abide, sat me and the local volunteer Guillaume down on a bench in the shade of a mango tree. Although she has barely anything (her water supply, for drinking, eating and bathing is whatever she can collect during the rainy season from her roof) she insisted that we eat mango (very yummy!). She only manages to buy ARV (Anti Retro Virals) some months, a lot of the time she is too poor and instead spends her money on providing food for her children.

One of the other women I visited yesterday, Massan, is currently also infected with malaria, she was very withdrawn, quiet and sullen. Too poor to be able to visit a doctor for a prescription, she was advised to stop by the free clinic at PDH this Thursday. Until then symptom control is all that can be done, her daughter was sent to by paracetamol (tylenol in US speak) from a pharmacy.

Although life here is an adventure, it is a huge learning experience too. Although I have been in multiple developing countries all over the world I have almost never experienced poverty at this level. The confrontation with the inequalities in the world and this extreme poverty is sometimes quite difficult. In addition, it is hard to understand the interviews with patients (quite a difficult thing is the language barrier, even with perfect French it would have been hard as most of the people helped by PDH are very poor and uneducated, their primary language is the local Ewe). It is clear however that the presence of a yovo means something to these people; it breaks up the isolation that a lot of HIV infected people find themselves living in here and it makes them realise that they have not been forgotten by humanity.