Under African skies

My headache disappeared. The tension drained from my neck and shoulders. I forgot the accumulated exhaustion from weeks of burning the candle at both ends. As I ran under a bleeding canvas of oranges, purples, and pinks I felt like I could just keep going, forever. I breathed the dusty air that teased of the much anticipated rains and heard a call to prayer in the distance. Around me the women wrapped in a rainbow of chitenje walked to their homes with buckets of water and baskets of food on their heads. Children laughed as they played games in the dirt path. Men rode by on bicycles, racing the quickly disappearing rays of light back to the village at the end of the work day. The scent of cooking fires tickled my nostrils.

This is the story of how we begin to remember

This is the powerful pulsing of love in the vein

The thing about living so close to the equator is that darkness (and hyenas) comes quickly. So, despite feeling like I could run forever I was forced to head back to my very dark house. No electricity tonight...but at least I had water - unlike the morning! I feel refreshed after some fresh air and exercise. For the last 3 months we've been trying to schedule a meeting with the Ministry of Health to present the results of our partner notification study. Partner notification was on the National Research Agenda developed by the MOH and the National AIDS Commission so you might think they were eagerly awaiting our results? Well, they called us last night to tell us they were available tomorrow. No choice but to put my dissertation writing on the back burner and spend the day putting together a presentation from all of our data -- the quantitative data from our trial and the qualitative data from the in-depth interviews and focus groups we conducted. Our clinic manager will actually give the presentation so I spent a lot of time working with him on his delivery.

The last few weeks have been stressful. The economic and political situation is a little unsettling, the electricity and water supply has been more erratic than usual, and the internet connection at work has been nonexistent. And, I'm desperately trying to finish a draft of my dissertation before the holidays.

However, I'm very excited for tomorrow's meeting. I may be idealistic (and I like it that way) but I'm not naive. I know that the national policy isn't going to change substantially. However, I'm proud of our work and think it's really cool that the next time someone tries to learn more about partner notification in developing countries their pubmed search won't come up empty. We helped a lot of people get earlier diagnoses and into clinical care. Hopefully we helped many uninfected people stay that way. And, we demonstrated that in spite of the, frankly rather patronizing, concerns of the West -- you'll never be able to implement that in AFRICA! it will be completely unacceptable to the population! that's just not appropriate for Africans -- that people are generally reasonable and understand the importance of something if you respect them enough to explain it to them.

These are the roots of rhythm

And the roots of rhythm remain