31 July, 2009 — MRZine – Monthly Review

It is Friday afternoon, and I am in the Johannesburg Oliver Tambo Airport preparing for my journey back to New York where I will arrive Saturday morning. I left South Africa and Swaziland at the beginning of July, only to return two weeks later to put together the project that I am now involved in. I was not sure how it would be to return so quickly, after spending so little time in New York and several days in Puerto Rico with Haydee and my grandchildren. I found this trip to be wonderfully productive and exciting, which encourages me in my ability to adapt to the flexibility that this new work will require.

To catch you up, I am here continuing the project to build nurse capacity out of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health ICAP. I flew straight to East London, got unpacked into my continually welcoming home in Gonubie, and took off to rural Eastern Cape province immediately, to begin a whirlwind ten days of developing a concrete proposal to present to the national department of health today. The initial attention towards nurses when the HIV/AIDS pandemic was finally recognized here was to capacitate nurses already in service — at the community clinics, at the district hospitals. Now there is growing recognition that focus also needs to be given to the nursing colleges and universities so that graduating nurses will be able to function in the complex and extremely demanding health environment created by this burden of illness.

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