Week 3: A Little More On....

The Life We're Living

Here’s what our typical day looks like: after having the coffee or tea we’ve made with the filtered-water-in-a-bag which one reader said she couldn’t visualize, we usually get to work somewhere between 7:30 and 8. We get there by taxi, which always costs 3 cedis (about $2.50) for the 15-minute ride, although often there is some brief haggling until the driver realizes that we do this every day.

There are various routes taken by our taxi drivers, but the sights along the way can be a study in contrasts -- from a typical street scene to the National Theatre .

















We normally work in “our” office, which we share with the Program Officer at APP. Actually, the office is pretty cushy because it used to be the office of the Executive Director but at the moment, there isn’t an ED. The cushiness is the good news; the bad news is that each office is its own world, cut off from the others (with closed doors because of the air conditioning) and there’s no open common area where people mill around and interact informally.

As you can see, the office is decorated with great AIDS-related posters, or, as we now say, Behavior Change Communication (BCC), that APP has created.


We work until the neighborhood of 4:00, except on Friday, which is both a half day and African-dress day, not only at APP but at many workplaces here. Even we obrunis – the Twi word for people of the pale persuasion – are encouraged to join in.













Then we go “home” and have a swim, a daily delight that is an important part of our wind-down and cool-off process. Afterwards, it’s down to the internet café on our street, open 24/7. Connection time is reasonable, prices are great, but the constant loud rap music (oh, the language they use!) keeps our stays shorter than they might otherwise be. Dinner, reading and/or dvd, bed.

To return briefly to Twi (pronounced chwee, with the ch being hard like in chair), the most common of the many languages in Ghana, here’s a very short lesson, short because, so far, these (plus obruni which you already know) are the only words we’ve learned/remembered:

Akwaaaba: Welcome
Medassi: Thank you


… The Work We’re Doing

You know that APP works on preventing and treating both HIV and STI among MARPs (Most At-Risk-Populations), consisting primarily of FSWs (female sex workers), their clients, their Non-Paying Partners (NPPs), and men who have sex with men (MSMs). (This is definitely an acronym-rich environment!) Here are some facts and figures:

• In Ghana, a country of about 22 million, the HIV infection rate is 1.9%, down from 3.6% not so very long ago. For an African country, this represents a real success. We’re not sure what Zimbabwe’s rate is, but it’s probably at least 10-20 times as great.

• There are about 3,000 seaters in the country and perhaps 20,000 roamers. The HIV rate among seaters is over 50% and it’s about half that among roamers. (The higher rate among seaters is because they’re older and have been in the business longer.) But the important fact is that both these numbers are down dramatically from where they were 5-6 years ago, largely due to APP.

• APP’s Peer Educators sell more than 5,000,000 condoms a year. It appears that once educated by the PEs, FSWs use condoms almost all the time (about 98% with clients, though lower with NPPs). In fact, condom use is so high that having access to a continuing supply of condoms is getting to be a problem.

• Every one of those condoms used is a potential transmission of HIV/STI averted.

Our job here is to help APP develop and write its 5-year strategic plan, which we’ve started to do. We will be presenting the draft of about half of that plan this coming week. Part of the draft is this great – our assessment – schematic of the what and how of APP’s approach. You probably won’t be able to read it, but we hope you’re suitably impressed.



Stay tuned.