Forms, forms, forms (aka. Our first day at work)
The day finally arrived where Sarah and I could begin our 1.6 million shilling placement with TASO.
If you’re expecting a grandiose story involving going out into the surrounding area, counselling those afflicted with this terrible disease and handing out life-extending medications, look elsewhere.
We sat in a room from 8:30am to 12:30pm and discussed the various forms that counsellors need to fill out on their various sessions with adults, children and the HIV positive variants of the clientele. It’s obvious that redundancies are important to ensure that no one gets lost in a system without the support of computers, but for every child a counsellor has to see, they have to fill out a registration form, a separate registration form for children under 17, a social support service delivery form (what type of assistance they received. ie. books, school tuition, ARVs), a monitoring form (if this is a follow up session) and a psychosocial assessment form to help ensure that the child/pre-teen/teenager is cognitavely mature enough to receive anti-retrovirals. Add to that list a Child Support Index that was just introduced from the US Department of State, the Ugandan Health Ministry and Duke University and you have some seriously overworked counsellors. We went through every single form, line-by-line… It was definitely tedious. At least we were fed with a tea break and lunch. The tea would’ve been great… but my body just can’t handle the hot 3% milk that forms the base of Ugandan tea. I just want some hot water :(
The best part of the day, regardless of the form-induced malaise I felt during our meetings was talking to counsellors about their successes and fears about HIV in Uganda. It was somewhat of a surprise to me (but not Sarah due to her Anthropology major) that ARVs have led the patient/client population to become careless about HIV now that the stigma behind the disease has dramatically been reduced. Education and behavioural approaches are definitely needed more than ever alongside the basic pharmaceutical intervention I learned about in undergrad.
Tomorrow bodes to be more exciting as we’re going out into the community with teachers from Zimbabwe, Ghana, South Africa and Kenya for home visits as well as meeting with the medical coordinator to lock down our schedules for clinics.
OH! There’s two roosters living in our compound right now… I think they’re dinner for our neighbours. They smell like pee.
-Casey
