Overseas Brief

JOHANNESBURG — While all of you are living it up in feet of snow, I’m sitting outside writing this in gloriously sunshiney, 70-degree weather (sorry for bragging). In all seriousness, I was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to spend my Jterm interning with the Tapologo AIDS hospice in South Africa. Even though I’m only two weeks in, I can safely say that I will return to Middlebury in February a changed person — for the better.
Here, I’ve witnessed some of the most heart-wrenching, poverty stricken living situations I’ve ever seen. Most of my work with the hospice involves learning about their therapy methods via shadowing some of their psychologists and counselors. These people largely deal with local nurses that work at Tapologo’s various outreach clinics, helping them to cope with the stresses of their job, as well as children and caregivers in the hospice’s Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVC) program, counseling children and educating the caregivers on child development. A typical day includes traveling to the villages where these clinics and OVC offices are, the villages being informal settlements of people — some with up to 20,000 — living in small, scrap metal shacks. These people struggle to survive amidst rampant disease, children regularly experience verbal, physical or sexual abuse, and food and water are never a guarantee. Counseling services are undoubtedly a need, but what has fascinated me thus far is how radically different and minor that need seems to be.
This past Monday, I met with a middle-aged, HIV positive woman who’d recently lost her husband. The woman, a counselor and myself sat underneath a tree near the clinic and spoke for maybe 15 minutes. Although she did grieve over her husband’s death, the woman spoke mostly about her monetary situation. She recently had to retire from her job due to her illness and was relying entirely on her husband’s income. Yes, she was upset that she was alone, but her depression, anxiety and stress primarily concerned survival. That’s the thing: most of these people don’t have time to dwell on emotions other than those regarding their basic needs of food, water and shelter. They can’t afford to think outside the now and they become extraordinarily adept at suppressing emotion as a result, because they simply wouldn’t survive otherwise. As such, I’ve come to think about many of the issues and disorders I’ve learned about in psychology classes at Midd as luxuries, in a sense. The majority of us have easy access to food, water and shelter, a lot of us probably have more clothes than we really need, and clearly we have the benefit of an education. We can literally afford to be depressed, for example, or obsess over trivial matters because taking a mental health day doesn’t mean we won’t get food. For the woman who’s husband had passed away, simply meeting with us for 15 minutes was, to her, time that she should’ve been spending figuring out what to do about her survival; and that’s exactly what she ended up talking about anyway.
So from what I’ve seen so far, counseling here does not involve weeks of therapy or medication. For most, simply identifying and verbalizing the problem is enough, being that taking the time to even address an emotion is a foreign concept. Once they figure out what they’re feeling and why they’re feeling that way, they’re able to move on.