Service Learning Placement: Take Two

In the last post, I was concerned about my placement at the Office for Institutional HIV Coordination on campus. This is a reflection I wrote for class on my thoughts on the placement and the work we had done about 6 weeks later (in mid- to late-April) - long story short, it was a great place to work and I learned a ton!

In the past week, the links within the community have really stood out to me. In the beginning of the semester, I thought that the Office for Institutional HIV Coordination placement was very separate from any of the other placements in the sense that we would not get out into the heart of communities that need more basic development assistance. On the contrary, working at the OIHC is complementary to many of the other site placements. For example, the congregation where we are planning to host an HIV awareness and testing weekend is the same congregation that runs Legacy in Kayamandi. In fact, our primary contact at the church is the same contact that I have heard the Legacy service-learners talk about. The church contact isn’t sure if it would be appropriate to link the HIV awareness event to the Kayamandi project. Our initial reaction was not to because HIV is a problem in white Afrikaner communities like this congregation, not just in the townships. However, I can talk to Liz and Christiana about whether they see a link as well. It is unfortunate that the contact has not yet made the link that the roles of myself and my partner at the OIHC are parallel to the role that Liz and Christiana could be playing since I have heard from the students placed at Legacy that the church contact only seems to see them as volunteers but seems to recognize myself and my partner as agents of the OIHC.

Another link within the service-learning community (and by extension the wider community within the Western Cape) is that my partner and I will be going with Carly and Sam today to Child Welfare Services to do a presentation for the students about HIV. We had heard them talking in class about how they sometimes have difficulty communicating with the students since the students prefer to use Afrikaans as their primary language of communication. To address this issue, we sent out an e-mail specifically seeking the assistance of an Afrikaans-speaking Peer Educator to accompany us to the site and help explain HIV in clear, simple terms that the students can understand. We got only one response, but that’s all we needed.

Through the process of working at the OIHC, I have gained valuable knowledge about HIV and also a deeper appreciation for the need to care for the person as a whole, not just to treat the disease inside of him or her.

In terms of the way that we have impacted the community, I think this project with Stellenbosch Gemeente Kerk could become a project that service learning students at the OIHC carry forward in future years. Assuming the project goes well, the OIHC will be able to use this example of working with a church in an effective and non-offensive way to build relationships with other churches in the community and reach out to groups that the OIHC has not had access to in the past. Particularly with HIV prevention, it’s important to reach as many pockets of the community as possible to ensure that they have the knowledge and resources to protect themselves and others from contracting HIV. Our community really is the community as a whole, not just the students, because students interact with non-students and transmissions occur in that manner as well.

I’m not sure if the OIHC service-learning students have worked with other service-learning sites in the past, but the service-learning class offers a built-in network with access to a number of other communities that OIHC can reach out to. The OIHC does not currently have the capacity to do all of the outreach that it would like to or that the community needs. Still, I will talk to my supervisor about the opportunity to arrange mini-outreaches like the one we are doing today at CWS if future service-learning students are looking for other ways to do outreach or do not have enough hours.

Throughout this semester, we have helped to establish new networking opportunities for the OIHC. We have been careful to balance the work in the sense that my partner and I are the main organizers on the side of the OIHC in planning the outreach with the church, but our supervisor has been involved throughout to ensure that he makes the connection with the church as well. It would be irresponsible for us to leave the OIHC not having established contact between the community and an OIHC staff member that will be able to maintain that working relationship in the future. It is our intention that this project of reaching out to the faith community opens up the door for future service-learning students to continue partnering with faith communities if they so choose.