More random stuff

Ok, I wanted to share this random, funny story: There is a man who lives in the bush by our apartment entry way (obviously that’s not the funny part, bear with me). He’s been there pretty much since when we moved in. At first it was a bit disconcerting to come home and hear the bush rustling every now and then, but he has proven to be very harmless. I certainly don’t begrudge anyone who doesn’t have a real home and I would feel selfish making an effort to tell our landlord to get him to move. His daily presence is a sad reminder of just how different life could be – I mean we all live within a few feet of each other; it’s just that some of us go to sleep every night in a bed with a real roof over our heads, and some hunker down in a bush with cardboard for cover. (FYI I read in the Cape Times headlines the other day that South Africa has just surpassed Brazil to become the country with the largest wealth gap between rich and poor in the whole world. I believe it.)

Anyway, the other night Byron, Julia, and I left the apartment to go to a movie and as we were getting into Julia’s car a man came out from the bushes and headed straight for us, waving something in his hand and speaking indecipherably. Assuming he wanted money, Julia and I said sorry and promptly got in the car, while Byron stopped to talk to the man. It’s actually a good thing he did. Funnily enough, the man was trying to give Byron his umbrella back, which had been missing for a few days and which Byron had evidently dropped in the parking lot. I can’t help but think how nice an umbrella would be for someone who uses cardboard as an alternative, so the fact that the man sought Byron out and returned his umbrella really was quite nice. Byron gave him R20 for the gesture, and off we went, feeling a little bit better about the state of humanity. And then when we arrived home and were headed in the door, from behind the bushes, the man raised a giant bottle of liquor in toast to Byron as we went inside. So, in essence, Byron bought the homeless man booze in exchange for his umbrella. I guess everyone got what they wanted, though in the end I couldn’t help but feel a little depressed about what the man chose to spend his money on and the vicious correlation of poverty and alcohol in some cases. I guess that’s reality sometimes.

Work has been interesting lately, and I think it’s about to get even more interesting. Last week Monica allowed me to jump in to the grant proposal process and I was able to help with the grant that we’re submitting to the Elton John AIDS Foundation for over a million dollars of funding that would be devoted to upgrading our M&E work and providing m2m better ability to not only capture data and measure program outputs, but also to pilot and evaluate new outreach strategies across many countries. It was exciting to learn more about all that is on the line for the future of the m2m M&E work, considering that’s my designated focus area. So yeah, aside from the fact that the office is truly miserably, unbearably FREEZING (yes, it actually surpasses the lab in that respect, for those of you who can use that as a reference point), things are going well!