A lot of you have been asking me about some of the details of my work and how I organize and stay in touch with the people that I partner with in such a rural area. I’ve realized that in my descriptions of my work here I’ve failed to describe my main tool for grassroots public health organizing: the bush note.
To communicate with people in a rural area, dozens of kilometers away, one must simply write a note, fold it, write a date, a name, and a village, and hand it off to someone walking in the right direction. The note gets handed from person to person until it (usually) ends up in the right place. In order to invite people to trainings, meetings, or remind work partners about projects I often end up writing dozens of bush notes a week. It’s amazing how far they can travel. I’ve even experimented in sending bush notes to Peace Corps Volunteers in different districts across Eastern Province by handing them to people in cars or buses and asking them to drop them off and start the process again in rural places far away. They’ve all been successful (though one ended up at another PCVs house one month after I initially sent it…who knows how many hands and eyes passed over that note). Mobile phones were introduced in Zambia a few years ago and have become prevalent even in rural areas but still the importance and functionality of bush notes has persisted.
Recently, in preparation for a large community event held last week I wrote over 50 bush notes (this time with the assistance of carbon paper)in order to make sure that people from all areas of my catchment area were mobilized and informed of the event. We held the first annual Tikondane Day. Tikondane is the new community based organization that one of my counterparts and I helped form for People Living With HIV/AIDS (PLWHA). In Nyanja Tikondane means love eachother. There were numerous nonfunctioning support groups when I arrived in Mwasemphangwe and it has taken my entire service here so far for Tikondane to fully emerge into the productive and solid group that it is today. The members are all PLWHA who want to support one another, reach out to other PLWHA, care for the sick, fight stigma in the community through education, and encourage people to go for VCT (Voluntary Counseling and Testing of HIV). We raised enough money for the group to register as a community based organization with the government and now they have started a beekeeping business to help them sustain their efforts in the community. In order to raise awareness of the new organization we held Tikondane Day 2011. The goal of the day was to introduce to the community a cohesive support group full of people who are strong, healthy, active, and HIV positive. It was a total success. Over 300 people arrived to celebrate Tikondane Day and 107 of them were HIV tested at the event. There were drama performances, poem recitations, dancing, music, and a big football match.
My counterpart with whom I helped form the group, the chairman of Tikondane, announced in a speech at the end of the day, “thank you for teaching all of Mwasemphangwe that a friend with HIV is- most importantly- still a friend.”
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