As most of you know, I’m teaching reproductive health to graduate students working towards masters’ degrees in public health and family health to undergraduates who are in a program designed to make them managers of reproductive health clinics throughout Zimbabwe. The need for health professionals is great. Because the economy in Zimbabwe crashed in 2007-2008 (yes, much worse than the US’s crashed in 2009), salaries for all kinds of professional workers are quite low. As a result more than half of the professionals trained, at least at the level of MD’s, have left the country for places that can pay them better within a few years.
I’ve been quite impressed with the students. I have nine masters’ level students, eight from Zimbabwe and one from Milawi. There’s an MD who has worked in the public sector with AIDS issues for some time, who wants to be able to do a better job, three people with nursing or midwifery backgrounds, all with a lot of experience, and several people from social sciences backgrounds who have been doing interesting things like working with child protective services, the agency that investigates disease outbreaks and the National AIDS Council. Only one of them has come straight out of an undergraduate academic program. The age range and variety of experience in this group makes for really interesting discussions.
The sixteen students in my undergraduate course include one each from Angola and Mozambique, and about half of the rest from Zimbabwe and the other half from Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). For the DRC students, English is at least their third language (behind Swahili and French), which puts them at a disadvantage relative to the Zimbabwe students. Most of the students work really hard, though. I just gave a quiz on the anatomy and physiology of the human reproductive system, and almost all of them did really well. My only complaint about this class is that people talk way too softly for me to hear them, much less for the rest of the class to hear them. Almost all of them are actively participating in the class (with a little help from participation marks).
I’m learning a lot about reproductive health in Africa. Surprise, surprise—the continent was hardly mentioned in my masters’ program way back when. I have to study a lot to prepare for my courses. I teach the graduate students for two hours each on Mondays and Thursdays and the undergraduates for two hours each on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. I’ve been trying to get started on course preparation over the weekends, but then I have Bible study on Mondays, so by Tuesdays I’m barely ahead of the students. Tonight is Thursday night, and I’m taking the evening off, since I don’t teach tomorrow.
I have two other assignments. One is that I’m team teaching a course about trauma in the masters’ program in Child and Family Psychology. That will begin this Saturday. That degree program is still working on its inaugural class. The seminar will have five or six students. They all hold full-time jobs, many of them in Harare (more than 2 hrs. away by car). They come down on Saturdays weekly and have classes from 8-10, 10-12, 1-3 and 3-5. That doesn’t make enough contact hours, so they also gather for one Friday a month on the same schedule. Their classes are starting late this semester because they were late starting in the fall and took finals after the semester was officially over, which resulted in the recording of their grades being held up. They couldn’t register for spring semester courses until that happened. I don’t know if they’ll add some Fridays or Sundays to make up the time or whether this semester will run late again.
The other assignment is helping a senior student in the nursing program with her research project. All the students in that group presented their research proposals during the first week I was here, and had difficulty with that task. They’re all on assignment (internship) scattered around the province, so they’re not very accessible at this point. I’m doing most of my supervision via email with the student I’ve been assigned. Her project is looking at attitudinal factors associated with the low rate of hospital deliveries in the jurisdiction of her assignment. It’s in suburban Mutare, and only 29-30% of women delivered in the hospital for the years 2010 and 2011. The infant mortality rate is very high, so it’s important to understand why people avoid the medical care, which is free. I know one factor from discussions with some of my colleagues: it is a Shona tradition to deliver the first baby in the home of the maternal grandmother, even if that means traveling to a rural area and delivering without benefit of skilled medical assistance. Needless to say, maternal mortality is also very high.
My greatest frustration with the work I’m doing is that I have internet access on average about 2 hours a day, usually first thing in the morning. Today we figured out that I didn’t have access when everyone around me did, so I plan to go to IT tomorrow and try to see if they can improve that. The university computer in my office doesn’t work at all, and there must be a setting on my notepad that is goofing me up.
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