Our Second Interact Club, Niel Chen and a touch of John Coltrane!

It's been quite a week for us and Macauley House School.  Last week's meeting saw Duduzile Fikene & Ayanda Moorosi give tell us about their experiences at the RYLA Camp.  They were accompanied by our former member Eleanor Hough, the Principle of Macauley House School.  It is always a great pleasure to have speakers from Macauley.

Then on Saturday we formally inducted Duduzile Fikeni as President of the reconstituted Macauley House School Interact Club.  It was a fun occasion with President Graham Donet doing the honours and the Interact Club members entertaining us in song.  As we now sponsor two Interact Clubs it will be great to bring them together from time to time.

For those who like cool jazz the Video Bar is John Coltrane.

This week our speaker will be Rotoractor Niel Chen:

Who am I?

My name’s Niel, but if you’re reading this, chances are you already know that. If you don’t, however:

I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010 with a degree in Biomedical Science. I found, however, that I was far more interested in some mix of nutrition, public health, and medicine. On a more interesting note, I am an avid cook, absolutely love baking, and I have a passion for photography. I’m partial to darkrooms, but they’re rare, so digital photography is my medium of choice. I also happen to be volunteering in South Africa for a year starting in January 2011. Hence the name of the blog: Crop, Chop & Change. Three things I can aspire towards.

What am I doing?

I will be working in South Africa in the field of HIV and AIDS outreach. I will not know officially what organization I will be volunteering with and how I’ll be helping until I interview with various prospective non-governmental organizations in South Africa, but I will likely be working with a program called Engender Health.

EngenderHealth has a focus in South Africa on “transforming men’s attitudes and behaviors to reduce gender-based violence and HIV prevalence. [They] also have worked to improve reproductive health services, including screening for and treating sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and HIV.”

I will also be embarking on personal and service projects of my own, working with the Rotoract Club of Philadelphia and others as extensively as possible.

Where will I be?

As far as I know, I will be living in the Melville suburb of Johannesburg. Johannesburg, and South Africa, to a lesser extent, is deceptively different compared to much of the rest of the African continent. Johannesburg is one of the largest cities in both Africa and the world, and is a large, urban, and developed city. With that said, there are still many impoverished suburbs in the city, and like many other similar developing cities, much of the area’s wealth is concentrated in small areas.

Poverty is still a stark reality in Johannesburg, and even worse, health care across South Africa lags significantly behind the standards of similarly sized developed nations. This has exacerbated the AIDS pandemic in the country, and up until the last two years, governmental leaders have taken stances of AIDS denialism and vegetable/herbal based treatments for the disease.