Coming home

Hello again! We are now getting very excited because we get to come home for a week for Al (my brother) and Tori’s wedding, which will be mint. Dreamt about it last night. I have a speech to prepare. I will be starting with a slide show and appeal for the Jabulani Foundation, before moving on to the regular best man’s speech. Hopefully everyone will be drunk and feeling generous.

Coming home will also be an ace opportunity to reflect on what we have done in 3 months and think about the next 6.

We are now at ‘small community saturation’ some days and the fact that everyone lives, works and socialises together gets a bit old. Who’da thunkit. Great people, but one needs one’s space and one has to work harder and be more organised here to get it. Cliques form unintentionally and people (particularly the girls) get offended left, right and centre for seemingly no reason. I am out of a lot of it because i don’t work at the hospital.

Why is no-one writing comments on the blog anymore? Hmm?

Meanwhile in random discoveries news, i went on facebook just now and came across www.ed-athlete.com. Some of the guys who i used to humiliate daily with unstoppable, aggressive blows to the body and head, have clearly got over the beatings and put together what will be a very good product. The website is ace and i am well excited for them. Seems that when i went to London to get all soft, they kept training and fighting and got good. Don’t get me wrong, i could still paste them, but it would be closer now. And that was a lie. Well done chaps.

Tinternet

I wrote this a week ago. Well the internet is no more. Or rather, limitless internet is no more. The Foundation was on a contract where you get pretty much limitless internet for a set amount each month. This meant that I could surf with gay abandon for work and also have a clear conscience going online for play, uploading photos etc.

But now that is all over and we are back to pay-as-you-go. Should be much better for the Foundation in terms of cost, but it will mean that I need to get frugal again with internet. Hence, this is being drafted in Word. And there will be fewer photos uploaded in future.

My body started to disintegrate after the last blog entry. Yes, the Comrades seems not to have let me away with it and I came down with a rotten cold with pulsating head and massive white-heads on nose. Sometimes I think your body gives up in general after a big event like that. It may also have been a mistake to play frisbee on Wednesday, in retrospect. Now I am coming out of it and I have read an awesome book and watched 3 movies. The book was part two in a trilogy, written by a Swedish fella called Stieg Larsson. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was good, but the Girl who Played with Fire was better and now I must get hold of the third or I will go mental. Not sure if it has been translated from the Swedish yet. They are all really exciting books with lots of sex and violence and whatnot.

I think it is a braai day. Kim is off to the hospital and will probably be there until lunchtime. Which gives me plenty of time to make the fire and prepare food.

We now have a volleyball court set up behind our house on the grass. Volleyball is tremendous. I intend a hostile take-over of the Frisbee monopoly. I do enjoy Frisbee but it really isn’t a sport when you think hard about it. Like cricket.

Organised, pro-active go-getter, never had sex before

On Tuesday, Sally and I will interview for two new ARV counselors. The role is extremely important in keeping HIV positive people alive by teaching and supporting the drug taking regime. We do not pay them a great deal, because we cannot afford it. R1000/mth is all. We are trying to find funding for more. The current situation means that counselors can be promoted to become hospital cleaners. Not cool. I hope to get back to you on that one.

But in the meantime, we recruit, and we got 35 application forms last week. It was very interesting reading them and deciding how to sift. First time my DfT experience has come directly to bear as I did a bit of recruitment before leaving London, but the process has to be different here. Most people are long term unemployed and badly educated. Memories of competency based interviews fade into the distance. The hardest thing to test for is initiative. We want someone with good English, who is organised, can learn processes and can take the initiative.

The form was fairly simple and largely tested written English skills, with some questions to tease out knowledge of the role and motivation for going for the job. Many attached CVs, education records and training course certificates. Sal made it clear that attendance at these courses counts for pretty much nothing, so we ignored them for the most part.

I suggested that we use a test of some sort to help our chances of finding someone fit for the job. On Tuesday night I will know if it was a silly idea. We are going to get one of the existing counselors to teach them how to do a simple diary task, before asking them to replicate it in the interview. It basically consists of them making a mock follow-up appointment with a pretend patient and ensuring that it is recorded and the patient understands. I am pretty excited to see how it goes. If we get some good potential people we are going to earmark them for future jobs. If we find a few with good English, we can use them as interpreters.

Another part of the sift is about asking them to turn up on time. We have said that if anyone is late we are not going to interview them. This is the right theory but in practice we may have to be more flexible. The whole Africa time thing means we are unlikely to get everyone there on time.

Ideally we want someone who is HIV positive, admits it freely and believes in the programme, has been through it and knows how important it is to take your drugs on time every day for the rest of your life. Not ruling out anyone else, but it would be a bonus.

One dude stood out from his application form. He attached certificates. I do not know how to set this one up for you, so I am just going to say it. The guy has successfully completed a virginity test. Twice. And he has the paperwork to prove it. (Doctor) Sal does not know how one would test for a man’s virginity. How we laughed. I am not in Kansas anymore.