Beginning of Cape Town

An 8 hour trip to London 11 hour layover and 12 hour flight to South Africa in a middle seat, I'm happy to have arrived in Cape Town. We walked to the waterfront in about 20 minutes and there are plenty of little shops and pubs. We found out fairly quickly how great the currency rate is on our end (15 RAND to 1 USD). A Venti coffee at Starbucks was about 2 USD. The following day we had lunch that gave a very scenic view of the iconic Table Mountain, for a preview of our cable up to the top of table mountain. We went at sunset and it was difficult to not take a bunch of pictures, yet they could never capture how beautiful it is. Yesterday was a pretty eye opening day, vacation mode turned into real time South Africa. We went into the slums and went to the clinic. It is exactly what you see in pictures of the poverty. People crowding the streets living in really small shacks or lying around the street homeless. When we got inside it was total chaos, tons of people waiting around kids running and hundred of people waiting for consult, treatment, blood work and results. The children were absolutely adorable. There is a tradition that when you stick your thumb out to welcome children will go touch your thumb and twist on it. I was shadowing a physician in HIV/AIDS and TB side of the clinic. All of us had different age groups but my physician was pediatric focused. It was very heart-wrenching to see the children who are just starting to realize what this disease means, yet the understanding was different with each patient. They passed out booklets to explain what it means in terms for children to understand. To see a little girl 2nd grade stop treatment because she doesn't see the point, she believe HIV/AIDS just means you're going to die. However, when you continually take your antiretroviral treatment it stays in remission and you likely don't have symptoms. Yet, this one girl who didn't take treatment for a year developed TB, skin infections, and very high viral load count and couldn't afford treatment. I cannot imagine what that must be like to be that helpless as a parent to not be able to provide the care for your child survival, especially when the child likely contracted from the mother. It is hard to keep up with blogging and journaling when we are so busy each day, but I will try my best to keep you guys posted!