Golf carts and horses, rental cars and zebras

After years of simply transiting through the O.R.Tambo International Airport in South Africa, I finally stayed more than an evening in Johannesburg, South Africa! And this trip was not without its own level of excitement.

I travelled with a fabulous team of three other SCMS project colleagues to facilitate our "pilot" course on improving Laboratory Logistics Systems. The course was held at the African Centre for Integrated Laboratory Training (ACILT) on the campus of the National Health Laboratory Services and National Institute for Communicable Diseases in Johannesburg. The campus is complete with wild animals mainly used for vaccine development- turkeys, sheep, geese and horses. We spent Friday, Oct 5th, prepping our training room and getting everything ready for the week-long course. Our colleague Jason, who used to work in South Africa for US-CDC took my other colleague Kate and I for a quick spin around the campus in the ACILT. It was a glorious sunny, blue sky day about 75 degrees. We drove by the horse stable and wouldn't you know one of the horses saw us coming in the cart, got a little spooked and nearly crashed into where I was sitting on the golf cart! Kate said she saw my life flash before her eyes :)  All was fine and it is a funny story to talk about now.

We enjoyed our one weekend in Johannesburg and took a short trip to Pilanesburg National Park. Now driving through a game park in a rented Honda Accord is probably not what you envision when you hear about African safaris. While the parked did have roads- some paved, some rocky dirt, our Honda was not really up to the task. No matter...we navigated our way out of Johannesburg using an old fashioned paper map and asked directions a few times-- not exactly what you want to be doing in Johannesburg, but we survived!  We arrived at Pilanesburg a little late in the morning- was hot for some of those animals to be out.  But we did see our fair share of animals in our car safari...zebras, giraffes, kudos, waterbuck, water buffalo, secretary birds, baboons, wart hogs, and finally at the very end of our day- a herd of elephants. Here are a few random shots from the car and a link to more!

I won't bore you all with the details of our course and supply chain management for health laboratories, but needless to say the 17 participants from CDC, USAID, and Ministries of Health from Lesotho, Rwanda, Vietnam, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, and Cote d' Ivoire were great. Was a reminder of the important work that my project does and how much the American taxpayers do contribute to helping people, countries, and health systems around the world.