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.