Good Weekend

On Friday I visited two orphanages where a few other volunteers are working. One was for children who were abandoned as babies and the other was for children whose parents had died. Both orphanages were actually pretty nice. I guess it's probably easier to get money for orphans than for adults. The larger of the two had about 70 kids and they had their own school attached. One of the volunteers I went on safari with donated two computers to them, making that orphanage probably the only one around with computers.

On Saturday I finally got to focus on counseling. I had also been working some counseling in when doing the needs assessment interviews, but this time I got to focus on counseling exclusively. I wasn't sure what to expect because until then I had not been able to successfully explain what counseling is to anyone here. Saturday is the day all of the members of WOFATA (or as many as can attend) get together and meet as a group. There were about 40-50 HIV/AIDS victims this week. As I said, I had not been able to explain what I wanted to do, and they kept expecting that I would somehow provide counseling the whole group together. I think the closest reference they had to counseling was church, so they were expecting me to stand up there and tell people the secrets to living a happy life. Instead, I wrote out a one page statement explaining what counseling is and what types of things I might be able to help with. Ali translated it to the group for me and six people got up to meet with me individually.

It actually went really well, which was a relief since I wasn't sure I could describe counseling in a way that made sense within the culture. One of the barriers here is that people don't like to give bad news, so they don't want to talk about problems. For example, if I'm meeting a group of people for dinner and I call one of them to say I will be late, that person probably won't tell anyone until I'm already at least 30 minutes late. The people here prefer not to give the bad news until it actually happens, or not at all if possible. Sometimes they will just phrase a problem in the past tense even though it is ongoing, like "I was horribly depressed when I found out I had HIV, but I'm okay now." Fortunately that wasn't much of a problem when meeting with people for counseling because I explained ahead of time that part of my job is to hear the bad news. Work is also highly valued here, so by explaining that hearing the bad news is part of my job I think they felt like it was more acceptable to talk about problems.

For the most part, people were interested in talking about everyday things that cause them stress. They knew I wasn't there to offer financial assistance, so we were just able to focus on things like the stress of not knowing where the next meal will come from, not knowing who will take care of your children next time you are sick, or of feeling lonely and isolated because of having HIV. One of the six people just wanted to ask me for a loan, but the other five took to the process pretty well. I think I will meet with three of them again, but I will just check in with the others to see how they are doing with what we talked about on Saturday. Next week we are visiting people in their homes, but I'm not sure if they want me to focus on counseling or continue the needs assessment. I know I will at least get to do some more counseling next Saturday. So far so good! I've heard it's not easy to do counseling through a translator, but I like it. That 20-30 second pause gives me plenty of time to think about what the person has said and what I want to say. I wish I had a little more time in Tanzania though. It's hard to make much progress with people when I can only meet with them twice...or three times at most. At least they have a good, supportive group in place already.