Busy at work

We’ve all been very busy with school and work lately. Maxine is busy doing her 6th grade graduation project, Alice has been busy learning Afrikaans, and Ruby has had several fun birthday parties (Happy 5th Birthday Ruby). Work has been very interesting for me lately. I’ve been visiting a lot of community agencies lately, and working on several interesting research projects with people at UNAM and people in the community.

One of the agencies I’ve been most impressed with is a grassroots community agency called Mount Sinai. It is an NGO that works with HIV+ mothers, with the objective of giving mild/food to their children for preventing mother to child transmission of HIV, and for giving food to children who are HIV+ and are taking antiretroviral drugs (they need a full tummy for those drugs). The founder of the project runs this woman out of her house – the dining room is her office, the bedroom is her supply room, etc., and she is amazing. She provides services to roughly 300 kids, and has an excellent success rate of keeping the children HIV-. She is really well-organized, and has plans for trying to get funding to open up a larger center. I was visiting the agency because one of my students is doing an income-generating project there, helping the mothers start up an ice cream/popcorn/cookie selling business. I was there with another lecturer, and we gave them lectures outside about running a business, investing, and all of that (complete with powerpoint slides beamed on the side of the house). They were all really motivated to be involved in this project. This is the type of organization that you visit and you want to help – because this woman is dong so much and is so competent, but is running on a shoestring. After visiting, I’m now written her a grant proposal template to use for gaining funds, and others in my department our helping as well. We even had our last faculty meeting at one of the beneficiaries place in an informal settlement in the township. We paid one of the beneficiaries to make us dinner, and we sat in her one room house eating fried mopane worms, mahango porridge, beans and drinking Mahangu beer. Quite a faculty meeting.



Liz with Christa, the founder of Mount Sinai, and Asaad, the 4th year social work student, in Christa's carport



The women from Mount Sinai who are starting up the new small enterprise