It has taken me about this long to finally figure out what exactly I'm doing for the next few months. I'll attempt to explain...
My main focus is on community participation and developing health polices that support this participation. That's a pretty intense sentence, so I'll unpack each part.
"Community participation" sounds pretty self-explainatory: we want individuals and groups within communities to participate in health and government, but it actually is a complicated idea and has even more complicated implications. With increased community participation, people have more autonomy to assess their health needs and problems, collaborate with others to create specific solutions for their community. Increases in participation also lead to increased community awareness of health related programs and activities, wider dissemination of knowledge and health education and increased equity of health care provisions.
So, if we accept that community participation is a good thing (hint: we do), then we need some type of policy framework that establishes the ways people can effectively do this. Since the end of apartheid, SA has made several policies that specificially address the issues of human rights, health and community participation.
For the next few months, I am going to be looking at the development of a specific health policy that outlines Community Health Committees (CHCs)--how it was created, the important actors involed in its development, the obstacles surrounding its implementation, and its strengths and weaknesses as a policy. CHCs are supposed to act as the voice of the people--their complaints, suggestions and opinions on the way health services are delivered and the health system as a whole. CHCs are supposed to pressure the government and hold them accountable for their health care promises.
Government can't provide all forms of health care to everyone because it doesnt have the resources to do this (sounds similar to the HC debates in the US...) So it rations and only provides what is most important and what it can afford to provide. If communities (rather than big companies or politicians) were able to influence the decisions on how to allocate health resources, we are more likely to reduce the big differences in health status between rich and poor and between rural and urban communities. This can happen by building partnerships between civil society groups and local government.
Community participation in health and human rights comes with a million different types of complications. One of the biggest difficulties is the fact that what is written down in policy and law is often not achieved in practice. For example, in many medical clinics, there is a big problem with nurses being rude and taking advantage of patients (think of it as a "power trip"). Nurses threaten pations that if they complain, the nurses will refuse them treatment. In addition, many nurses do not wear name tags (even though they are required to by law), so even patients who might be willing to make statements to CHCs cannot identify the specific nurses that are threatening them.
I'm sure all these problems will be completely worked out in the next few months, no problem.
Lots of lemon trees:
Also ostrich, cattle, springbok, and other game animals 
The next day we drove about an hour and went walking around to see some ancient cave paintings, then stayed the night at a guesthouse in Gekko 
On Sunday we drove up to see some wine farms 
