Reading and Retrospection

Today, I spent all day working to read some material that we got from Pastor Vessie about HIV/AIDS. There were tons of helpful facts and a few good ideas of how to approach this topic with young people. I would say that I read through maybe one fifth of all of the material he gave us, so I still have a long way to go over the next week. It's sort of tedious work, but I will gain a really useful fact or idea every once in a while, so it is definitely worth doing. Also, I wrote before that I would work to get some of my initial thoughts from my last visit here, so here are some of my initial impressions from August 2006:
Our first day, Doctor Galela gave us a tour of what we were seeing. We drove through the shantytown of Alexandra, which housed, according to Doctor, over 400,000 people in an area that I would guess would be probably about 10 square miles. Driving through Alexandra was an experience unlike any that I have had before. We saw people living just about on top of one another and there were community toilets and only a few locations to get running water throughout this whole informal settlement. People built “houses” out of discarded siding, bricks, scrap metal, and anything else that was solid and could be used as a shelter from the elements. Doctor told us that most of the women living in these informal settlements were involved in prostitution in order to make some money. He went on to tell us that “women” were girls that were 13 or 14 years of age. Makeshift fruit stands, barber shops, and used clothing piles were set up everywhere by people simply trying to make ends meet.
We drove from the informal setting of Alexandra to downtown Johannesburg. Downtown Joburg was the absolute opposite of everything that we had seen in Alexandra. In downtown Joburg, we were in the midst of a city that reminded me a lot of a larger version of Grand Rapids. There were skyscrapers for Coca-Cola and Vodacom. We passed Jaguar and BMW dealerships. We stopped and had lunch at a mall, which stood in sharp contrast in our minds to the shantytowns that we had just driven through.
That's a little snippet of my initial experience and reaction.