Public Health in Khayelitsha & Mfuleni

For our class Healthcare and Community Development in South Africa, we spent one of our weeks working with the Health Promoters of the Western Cape of South Africa. With the motto “prevention through education,” the Health Promoters have a series of initiatives in the townships, places of employment, and schools of the Western Cape. Spending four days in the various offices and onsite locations, we helped develop the educational material and eventually presented our power-points to a few different groups.

While the organization would benefit from further development, it has several redeeming qualities. The Health Promoters provide an inspirational level of empowerment for the people, and especially the women of the communities they work with. On our last day we visited Mfuleni where a group of impoverished single mothers meet to discuss their hardship and search for solutions. These women are vivacious and inspirational in their own right. Despite cultural differences, it was powerful to find commonalities amongst us all. Below are a series of images documenting the time we spent teaching in the later half of the week.