EOAF Donates Mobile Testing Center
Etafeni is a project base community centre outside Cape Town, South Africa. The Summer 2008 team met with the leadership of Etafeni and listened to their varied needs. One stuck out –
At that time, a team of nurses went out into the community with tents and coolers to do outreach HIV testing. Battling low numbers of people being tested due to stigma, weather conditions hindering testing opportunities, safety concerns, sanitation concerns, and simple professional service their patients deserve, this team of nurses wondered how we could help. Several cups of tea later, we had come up with the idea of a mobile caravan, and our volunteers set out to find one.
Searching caravan dealers (think a small trailer home attached to the back of a truck) high and low, we finally found a dealer with the perfect caravan. Unfortunately, the dealer wouldn’t sell it to us. Apparently, he had a sour experience donating in the past, and had given up trying to help the Townships all together. Our volunteers were persistent though, and wondered how he could deny a cash payment for the caravan. Then, taking everyone by surprise he took a change of heart, donated the caravan and all the parts and time we needed to turn it into what we needed.
He said he was embarrassed Americans had to come to his country to do something he was unwilling to do. And so we set to work in his machine shop across the street alongside our South African mechanic friends for several days wiring the caravan for electricity, putting in one way tinted glass for privacy, resurfacing the inside and out, and giving the whole thing a once over.
Once it was finished, the “Etafeni Mobile Testing Centre” was complete. We filled it full of goods, wrote a giant check to support the first year of running the unity, and donated it to the nurses. That night, Jeff had an email from the people in the apartment above the machine shope with aerial photos of the team working on the caravan attached. Without ever meeting face to face, they are now supporters of the Eyes on Africa Foundation!
One year later, the Summer 2009 team revisited Etafeni to find the incredible success of the caravan – which raised the number of people being testing by 700%. Read more about our work continued work with Etafeni here.