Caregivers Day

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With an HIV prevalence over 20%, Lesotho has many children with HIV/AIDS. One of the Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) works at the Baylor Pediatric Aids Clinic, where they recently held a Caregivers Day event. Kathy and I attended, along with our friend and Kathy's colleague, Ulker, a doctor from Turkmenistan who came to help out in Lesotho for a couple of months this Spring.

Several organizations, including Peace Corps, worked on putting together the event, which featured both activities and informational sessions. We sat in on one of the informational sessions (on recognizing the signs of child abuse), and I was impressed with how full and detailed the presentation was. The session was given by local, i.e. Basotho, social workers, who had been trained by a Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV).

The PCV and other volunteers involved in the project seemed really engaged in the work, and helped to put together some hard-hitting information for attendees. Later, one even confessed that she had been uncomfortable gathering some of the detailed health-related content off the web (but apparently had recognized it was important enough to see it through).

Here they are during some introductory exercises:


And some of their enthusiastic participants (including some folks from Sentabale):

And my wife, the Country Director, observing:


What the volunteers and staff of various humanitarian organizations, like Peace Corps, do here is hard. Then again, Peace Corps once had as its motto, "The toughest job you'll ever love." Here are four of these humanitarians, pausing briefly to pose:


Peace Corps and the other organizations doing work like this in Lesotho should be proud of their people and the work they do.