Adventures in April

The last week in April was an time for another adventure.  Josanna, Elizabeth, Bilen, and I drove from Gabs to Rustenberg, spent the night at a cute bed and breakfast and had our customary sushi dinner at the Cape Town Fish Market in Rustenberg.  The next morning we drove to Joburg arriving with plenty of time to sort out where to leave my car.  We ended up giving the car to Jacob a guy who works for a valet service at the joburg airport.  They have a business where they pick up cars at the departure terminal, take care of them (including washing them) and return them to the arrival terminal upon your return.  They came highly recommended by the owners of the Bed and Breakfast in Rustenberg.  Though I was still pretty skeptical of giving my car to a total stranger in a city known for car theft, it worked out!  He drove us from the airport to the bus terminal and was there with the car when we came back and it was cleaner than it has been in a long time!  Our bus was 1.5 late so we left Joburg at 11:30 pm and arrived in Maputo at 9:30 am the next day after an uneventful bus ride where we were able to sleep a bit.  From Maputo we got a ride to Bilene a beach town about 3.5 hr away.
Bilene was a really tranquil place.  Not too touristy.  We stayed at a place about a 45 min walk from town which was on the lagoon beach.  We spent three days relaxing at the beach, snorkeling with sea horses, and hanging out at a great local bar.  Chichunga's became our home away from home.  Each day we bought fish from women whose husbands had caught it that morning and Chichunga marinated it during the day and cooked it for us that night.  It was the best fish I have ever had (as you can see in the pictures, we did not leave any behind).
After 3 days, we rode back to Maputo and met up with Gelane (who had been to Cape Town with plans to run the 1/2 marathon - though those plans were thwarted by shin splints she still had a good time there). Maputo is a much busier city than Gabs, and a lot dirtier.  We took tuc tucs around the city, explored an old fort, ate at the fish market, and did a fair amount of shopping.  At night we found a great bar/club which had live karaoke and the following night a reggae band.  We had a minor run in with the police since we were not carrying our passports on our way to a club!  They pulled us over during a random stop (when we happened to have 6 people (including the driver) in a cab which is apparently not allowed, though many more unsafe modes of transport seem to be just fine) and told us that we were supposed to have our passports with us at all times.  After much hemming and hawing (I think they were just looking for us to bribe them), they finally agreed to accompany us back to the backpackers where we were staying so we could show them our passports and then they left us alone. There were also several run ins with giant rats everywhere we went, not the best when you are eating!
After another overnight bus ride back to Joburg we drove to the Drakensberg mountains (a mountain range on the border of South Africa and Lesotho).  It was gorgeous.  We stayed at a great backpackers where there happened to be the "Smoking Dragon's Women's Music Festival"that weekend.  48 hours of music from woman performers. It was great fun though we will have to go back to actually explore the Drakensberg since we didn't get to do any hiking.
Here is the trip in pictures: )

Training, Passover, and Tutoring

The very appropriate coaster that was on the presenters' table during our training.

The first week of April I was back to Bloemfontein, South Africa to do another training.  This time it was an Advanced Pediatric HIV Training.  Many of the nurses and doctors who attended had been at the basic training in February.  It was quite a challenge to explain concepts of antiviral drugs developing resistance to a group of mostly nurses who do not really have the background to understand it (resistance is a very complex topic even for specialists).  But we managed to make it a bit fun by having the participants act out the parts of virus and drugs to visually demonstrate.  Nevertheless many of the participants got to catch up on their sleep during the training, though we got a lot of positive feedback at the end and people did do better on the post test than they had on the pretest.

After a week in Bloemfontein, I returned to Botswana and got to celebrate another passover in Botswana.  This time Liz and Jon hosted a seder.  We could not find any matzoh this year (though there was some last year, I am not sure what happened).  So Liz actually made her own matzoh!!  And then she even crushed it up to make matzoh meal and matzoh balls which were darn good!  

Jon was a very entertaining seder leader

Gelane throughly enjoyed her first seder and first matzoh balls!

We had a lot of vegetarian dishes and I made a really good flourless chocolate cake (thanks to Mom for bringing me Scharfenberger chocolate which totally made it).  

We even had Leonard (one of the Infectious Disease doctor's almost 2 year old son) to find the afikomen.  (He lost his pants during an accidentally spillage earlier in the evening and was more interested in the wire bowl he found than in bargaining for something in return for the afikomen ;)  It was great to be able to celebrate with friends, though I did miss the crazy Scherzer/Reisman seders!

During April I also did a lot of tutoring (I was trying to teach multiplication to K.N. above).  We started a tutoring program for patients in our clinic as many of them are doing poorly in school (a combination of being sick a lot, missing school frequently for routine doctors visits, and developmental delay can happen from HIV itself - especially for those patients who were started on treatment later in life.)  We have recruited volunteer tutors from University of Botswana, among other places, and are now able to offer tutoring every day and on Saturdays.  I spent a few Saturdays in April trying to remember how to do calculus, explaining long division, and learning the capitals of African countries.