Cape Town - Day 2 (I think)

It's Tuesday afternoon in Cape Town, and trip is winding down. We head out to another health clinic in an hour, then off to Durban for a day, then to Johannesburg for a day, then home on Thursday.

Cape Town has been a bit of a respite in that we're in a touristy part of a modern European-style city. On the other hand, it hardly feels like Africa, the twelve jillion African tschochke shops nothwithstanding.


Cape Town waterfront - all it's missing is a tic tac toe-playing chicken.

We got away from the hurdy gurdys and juggling unicyclists and to visit a women's health clinic yesterday. The clinic was created to serve women who are affected by abuse in the home, and provides a wide variety of services, including HIV testing, counseling, and basic health care, and family planning, among them. The director was yet another one of the highly competent, deeply dedicated people we've met on our visit. The problems that people face in each of the countries we've visited are profound, but I do take some comfort in the fact that there are such impressive people working to solve them.

Today, we visited with graduate students who are studying demography in a special program at the University of Cape Town. This is said to be one of the most rigorous programs in the world, and the students are exhausted and stressed as finals approach this week. We met with six students - three from Zimbabwe and one each from Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Sudan. The goal is for these young people to be able to achieve the kind of expertise in demographic research necessary to make good policy across the continent. It's a tall order, but boy oh boy is there a need to understand demographic trends here.


Grad student Innocent Karangwa (center), says he would like to return to his native Rwanda to help advance health research there.

Needless to say, funding demographic scholarship sends reporters reaching for the nearest pillow to take a life-affirming nap, but there is still so much we don't know about how to alleviate poverty that these intelligent, ambitious scholars might be able to figure out. As we learned in our meetings with Rwandan ministry officials, collecting data is hard enough, interpreting it is even harder, and the need for such experts is profound. So it won't make any headlines, but that's fine with us.