Dog's Bollocks

A picture on my own camera showing that I am indeed still alive and in Africa!  This was taken on the roof of my apartment building.

This week and for the next month the majority of my time outside of work will be spent working on my masters applications and my travel plans for my weeks off of work.  I will hopefully be completing my applications by the end of September/start of October.  In October I get to take 2 full weeks off of work and roam around South Africa and neighboring countries.  The plans are in a very basic form at the moment, but they include a Kruger Safari and a trip to Victoria Falls.

Projects at PATA:

·         Local Forums – We are well underway planning 4 local forums that will be occurring in September and October.

·         Database – I have been creating and updating various databases in our network.  This includes updated clinic information and contacts. It turns out we have over 230 clinics and are still accepting new ones.

·         Proceedings – I have been compiling the proceedings from the 2011 Botswana summit that will be made into a book. This involves e-mail correspondence with all 47 different summit speakers.  This is semi-difficult as some of the speakers were doctors from remote clinics all over Africa, and they are very hard to reach even by e-mail.

·         Research – The first PATA research project on frontline healthcare workers needs for palliative care almost has the protocol finalized and the initial draft of the questionnaire complete.

·         Grant proposals – We are all working on different parts of grant proposals in the hopes that we get more funding.

·         Social media – We have been updating Facebook and Twitter.  I have been informing all of our contacts that they can use this method to learn about what is happening at PATA and find information about the upcoming forums and summit.

·         2012 Summit planning – There is lots of work surrounding our upcoming southern Africa summit in December.  The three days are going to focus on continuum of care, managing co-infections, and disclosure along with the master classes.  We are currently accepting applications from clinics to attend in December, as well as finding expert speakers, arranging the logistics, and managing everything else that comes with a conference of this magnitude.

I’m sure there is more going on at work, but I can’t remember at the moment. I stayed home from work sick today.  Nothing horrible, but I spent the weekend laying in my bed/living room/watching movies as I just overall did not feel very good.  Hopefully that goes away soon.  I am sure I will be back at work tomorrow.

This weekend I did leave my apartment to go eat at the Dog’s Bollocks. It is a burger joint in this garage down a side street where they only serve 50 burgers a night.  You have to get there early or else you won’t get to have a burger that night and have to try again another night.  The burgers were huge and hard to bite down on.  Sadly I couldn’t finish mine, but Leila and Sarah did.

I also have old photos from a couple weeks ago of Sarah and I baking.  

I walked by a protest on my way home from work on Friday.  People were picketing in front of the police station. They were giving speeches and filming it.  The cops blocked off the roads so no one could drive down in front and hit the protesters.  They were just watching it happen, not really caring since it was fairly well contained and not violent.

In other news, South Africa had one of its worst incidences of violence since Apartheid ended 18 years ago.  Outside Johannesburg, 3000 workers went on strike calling for higher wages.  The police shot and killed 34 miners, injuring 78 others.  Supposedly the police tried non-lethal methods of stopping the protest first such as tear gas, but fired shots when charged by the armed crowd. 259 people were arrested with weapons including spears, machetes, and clubs.  Tensions had been escalating for some time with 10 people killed in a different Lonmin mine the week before.  27 percent of the platinum mine workers reported for their morning shift today.  Zuma has declared this a week of national morning.