Vuvuzela Fever

Well, I wrote a nice long post a couple of days ago and my internet went down before I got it posted. I've been included in a couple of meetings this week that have taught me much about the public health work in communities here, and levels of training of the various community workers. I was asked to explain our project to a group of leaders from NGOs working on AIDS initiatives, special needs, mental health, and community health, as well as professors from University of Cape Town and University of Western Cape concerned with the levels of training and credentialling of the workers who learn to carry out these programs. The group sponsoring the meeting was Community Mutual Trust. Jawaya and I met as well with some guys from an NGO called Molo Songololo. They previously implemented a training for mothers of young children project - differently structured than ours, but lost funding for it. They have current funding for a school based project encouraging adolescent boys to value education and make choices other than violence and drugs - very interesting! The guys there are so enthusiastic, and so committed to teaching within the context of the boys' lives. Then we moved on to a meeting with the folks at the Burn Unit at Red Cross Children's Hospital. They are also interested in recruiting parents for our program, as well as collaborating with Jawaya on desiging a Child Life Specialist track in their UCT health masters curriculum. Robert reported today that the Fertile Ground camp weekend's registration is full! There will be chronically ill children 7 and up with or without parents staying over at the camp, as well as some younger children and their moms, who will receive the first couple of sessions of our training program. The kids will no doubt have a marvelous time, and will all go home with elevated self-esteem, a sleeping bag, and a soccer ball! At the end of my work day today Jawaya announced that she was calling Helen Zille's office as well as Desmond Tutu to pitch our training program as support for both the government initiative against drug abuse and children's rights. She's so committed to improving the quality of life for this generation of children in South Africa!
So - what is a vuvuzela? The long plastic horns that the soccer fans blow at the games! There was an article in yesterday's Cape Times about the decibel level in the stadium damaging people's hearing with all those fans blowing their horns. At 6 am this morning someone was blowing a vuvuzela in the street outside my window. I blamed Andrew, but he swears he was not in Obs yet at that time of the morning. Though I did see him at 9 with his vuvuzela - Ivy too, and before the day was over, Jess and Ivy were driving around delivering Ivy's Kitchen dinners in Jess' car blowing the horn out the window as people on the street answered with theirs. Sort of like ILL - INI. At midnight tonight all of South Africa is to go outside and blow their vuvuzelas. No chance of sleep until after that for sure. We plan to go to the big opening celebration at fan park tomorrow. We heard, though, that it was full already today, so we'll see how close we can get. All the city of Cape Town will be celebrating! Go Bafana Bafana! Ivy's feeling it, and it's contagious!