Peace Corps volunteers end tour of duty

THATO CHWAANE
Staff Writer | Wednesday March 7, 2007 00:00

Speaking at the farewell luncheon organised for them by their ambassador, the Minister of Health, Professor Sheila Tlou, commended the Peace Corp volunteers for their good work and said she too benefited from them when she was doing her secondary schooling at Kgale.

Tlou said all her Science teachers were Peace Corp volunteers and now, after 30 years, she became her country's minister of health.

The volunteers were assigned to different sectors, such as the District AIDS Coordination, Prevention of Mother To Child Transmission (PMTCT), Community Home Based Care, Orphan Care and Non-Governmental Community Based Organisations.
As a former Peace Corp volunteer but now US ambassador to Botswana, Katherine Canavan said that the volunteers should be proud of what they had achieved whilst here.
She noted, among others, the 'Zebra 4 Life' campaign that promoted HIV testing.
Canavan said the volunteers would be moving to other areas of their professions but noted that nothing would ever replace the memories of Botswana. She said that they would be educating other Americans about other cultures since there are important elements in other cultures that enrich the US.

Canavan said had she not been a Peace Corp volunteer, she would not have gotten into the Foreign Service or been an ambassador. She noted that the volunteers' experiences would have an impact on the rest of their lives.

President Festus Mogae, who also graced the occasion, commended the volunteers for having decided 'to leave the comfort of their homes and their better resourced country to serve our distant communities.'

'I commend you for being amongst those members of the human race who have decided, not in exchange for any material reward, to make a positive difference to the lives of others,' Mogae said.

He said the volunteers were leaving at a time when there is a levelling of the rate of HIV infection. The uptake in HIV/AIDS related intervention programmes, he said, is a result of increased sensitisation, awareness and accessibility. He said that the uptake of PMTCT was 91 percent and there were 79,490 patients enrolled on antiretrovirals.

Mogae told the volunteers that they should go back with the satisfaction that they had succeeded in their mission of making a positive difference to the lives of real people and families.

Although there were indications, he said, that the prevention, care and support efforts are bearing fruit, there was a need to intensify, sustain and scale up on intervention services. However, Mogae said this desire was constrained by limited resources and other issues, such as drug resistance, repeated pregnancies amongst people on ARV and inadequate partner support, especially that of male involvement and the need to intensify behaviour change.