Map of my little world inside Joburg

I made a little Google map of where I am to give folks a lay of the land.
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=110176479543937992356.00000112e35056fa42f96&t=k&om=1&ll=-26.187367,28.037109&spn=0.018678,0.029182&z=15
Double-click on pins or lines for a description; click and drag a part of the map to pan around it or click on the arrows in the top left; zoom in & out with the +/- controls on the left.

Joburg on Strike

I am working from my apartment tomorrow because of the difference between 6% and 57%. Let me explain. Public workers (about 1 million of them in South Africa) were offered a 6% increase in salaries whereas government officials increased their own salaries from upwards of 50% (President Thabo Mbeki himself got a 57% increase in salary). An article on the strike is here. The folks I work with actually said was that I should not leave my apartment tomorrow because 1) I probably would not be able to get into the Wits medical school building because the public workers are going on strike, which includes the guards and 2) it might not be safe as strikes & marches can explode into bloody conflicts with the police (in a past strike 200 Wits student protesters were arrested and there were many injuries due to police force).
So tomorrow I'll try to catch up on 2 other projects I'm working on & on my Spanish-version Harry Potter reading (in prep for Peru!)

Constitution Hill

Today I went with Solomon (a faculty member of Wits in the Social Work Dept. who immigrated from Eritrea) to look at Constitution Hill. This hill is a public testament to post-apartheid South Africa: on one side it has turned the old segregated prisons into museums- focusing on how under apartheid the blacks and whites were not equal under the law and the brutal conditions for black prisoners; on the other side is the Constitutional Court- the highest court in the land that upholds South Africa's post-apartheid constitution where a person's color does not matter before the law. The second photo is the inside of the constitutional court where the Justices preside (they call them "Justices" and not "judges"). Click here for a 1 minute MP3 of my tour guide's explanation of the South Africa Flag. The next 2 photos are quotes from Nelson Mandela, who began his many-year political imprisonment at this place. The wall photo is from "Number 4", the jail that was for black prisoners. Amazingly, even Ghandi spent time at these jails- he had initially come to South Africa to serve as a stretcher bearer during the Boer War (now called the "South African War" to acknowledge the role that black South Africans played in it), and then afterwards as an advocate for Indians and proponent of peaceful resistance (Indians were also second-class citizens under the old government, and in jail the Indians stayed with the "coloreds", but they did not have it as bad as the blacks). The young chap with the smart mustachio, believe it or not, is the man who would become the Ghandi that we know in the US. Lastly is the cover of today's newspaper- getting rid of apartheid did not solve all of the society's problems, but it was clearly a huge step to fixing some of the most glaring.
People & terms:
-Nelson Mandela
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_mandela
-Apartheid
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartheid
-Mahatma Ghandi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghandi

Wits

I started work on the project today at the University of Witwatersrand "Wits". Here is a picture of the campus- it's winter here (low 60's F) so people are wearing hats and bundled up. After a morning going over IRB revisions, I met with Prof Ross (a social worker/ speech pathologist) who has been showing me around. We went to the Origins Center Museum on campus (see the next 2 photos, Dr. Ross is in green in the second) which has exhibits on Africa's role as the origin of much of human archeology and anthropology. Last is sunset over campus. Tomorrow I'm meeting with a guy named Solomon, who is a social worker and refugee from Eritrea. He's going to introduce me to a bunch of international students at Wits that are here for a human rights course.

Touchdown Jo'burg

Hello from Johannesburg, South Africa. I'll be here for a month doing a pilot research project.
Where:
Johannesburg, South Africa. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannesburg
About 40% of gold ever found is from this city. It will be home to the 2010 World Cup of Soccer. In one part of the city there are 2 Nobel laureates on the same street: Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. I will be working with professors from the Biko Center of Bioethics (named for an anti-apartheid martyr) at the University of Witwatersrand ("white water ridge", the name of a place where massive gold deposits were found). The school has about 25,000 students and Mandela is an alum of the law school. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_the_Witwatersrand
What:
Trying to figure out what HIV infected patients prefer: more access to the cheap drugs or less access to the more expensive drugs. This is an important question because right now only about 1 in 5 people that need drugs get any drug because of severely limited resources, the more expensive drugs are about 15 times as expensive (so for each person that gets the expensive drug 14 people can't get the cheap drug), and the health systems are making that decision without patient input now.
Why:
Interesting, socially worthy project that I can contribute to. Plus I'll get to see a bit of Africa (never been here before) and go on safari!