Ryan becoming more aware of social issues

For my activist project in which were to get involved in the community to address a current social issue, I had the privilege of working at a few tuberculosis clinics in Mitchells Plain and at Red Cross Children’s Hospital in Rondebosch. Luckily, I ran into a doctor at Tafelsig Clinic early on in the semester that rotates to other clinics to treat tuberculosis and took me with to shadow her at Lentegeur and Eastridge Clinics. I wanted to learn more about the disease that isn’t as common in the U.S. and after learning how it is associated with poverty, I decided to address it as my project. As an important part of the project, I got to conduct home visits with a Sister (nurse) at Lentegeur to address certain patients in the community nearby. The homes we went to were mostly of patients who default on their treatment and do not come in for their scheduled appointments. This allowed me to approach and speak to these patients individually to educate them in the comfort of their own homes about the importance of curing their illness while showing them that others truly care about their health. A significant and common consequence of failing to complete treatment that I learned is that the bacteria may become resistant to the antibiotics fueling the prevalence of multi-drug resistant (MDR) TB strains that drain expensive resources and time. Another common issue is that children are often exposed to this disease through an infected family member allowing them to fall ill as well. About half of the patients I’ve witnessed at both clinics have been children and many of them were being diagnosed a second time. This led me to my interest in Red Cross Children’s Hospital as repeat TB children are referred there as treatment protocol. Friends of the Children’s Hospital Association is a volunteer organization at Red Cross that allowed me to come in and play with children to give them extra emotional support to help the healing process. I learned a lot from this activist project by becoming a more aware of some of the social issues that make progress so difficult but also how valuable time and effort can be when it is dedicated to helping out others.