Sinik'ithemba

Meet my friend. I had lunch on the swingset with him. He's 8 years old. He has an uncle who snores and a cousin who wants to paint cars. He likes McDonalds and KFC. His favorite juice is grape and he wants to be a doctor when he grows up. He wants to play rugby when he gets older too. He doesn't like speaking Zulu. We shared my mango slices. He has HIV. He calls it the sickness and asked me if I had it too.
There are so many kids here with HIV. Happy, jumping like frogs, playing soccer, spiderman wannabes with HIV.
One of the 16 year old girls I saw, met a guy and had sex with him once. Now she has HIV too.
If a patient has HIV, they're almost guarenteed to get TB here too.
I'm working in the HIV/AIDS clinic, Sinik'ithemba, right now. So all my patients are HIV positive. Some of them are really sick with the largest livers I have ever palpated, while some of them have high CD4 counts (that's good) and are living healthy lives on their ARVs. It's encouraging to have those healthy patients come in after a day full of sick patients who are full of opportunistic infections. I'm really glad I am getting this experience, since I don't feel like I learned much at all in nursing school about the different ARVs (the medications to keep HIV patients healthy) or the opportunistic infections patients frequently get with HIV. I'm especially glad for this experience since I want to open a clinic one day. Now I'm even getting to see the politics involved in all this and how the government's regulations really effect the patients care.