Health Clubs in Winter in South Africa

So it’s been about a week and a half since arriving in South Africa and we have been busy both adjusting to life here and to work! As you know, we’ve moved from Dr. Puoane's house to a hostel in Cape Town proper.

As far as experiencing the Cape Town culture, Sarah and I have been playing tourist a bit with seeing Table Mountain, Boulder Beach where there are African Penguins, and taking a hop on-hop off bus around town. We are hoping to go to Robben Island on Monday and Cape Point when the weather is nice. We’ve also been just walking around Cape Town’s popular Long Street, listening to lots of South African music, and talking to the hostel owners about anything and everything South African!

As far as work goes- we’ve now been into Khayelitsha twice, last Thursday and this Thursday to see the health club, meet the women that own it, the members, and see their routine. The health club is slow in the winter because many of the members are elderly and suffer from arthritis or do not want to brave the cold or the rain. So last Thursday, none of the members came because it was raining and this Thursday only 5 came because many of them had the flu. However, Sarah and I have been taking it all in and making relationships with the Community Health Workers, seeking their advice for the project we are working on. As far as that goes, Dr. Puoane has asked us to interview the members about current exercise and dietary habits in order to create a menu for the health club that they can follow given cultural and financial restrictions and the accessibly to food. I’ve included in this e mail the questions that we came up with and that Dr. Puoane has gone over. We’ll be asking these questions next Thursday when we meet with hopefully more members of the group. During the meeting next week, we plan to conduct this interview as a focus group type session. Based on their answers, we will design a menu with the South African dietary needs in mind and taking the foods that are accessible to them, cheap, and that they like to eat. The following Thursday, we will present our menu that we have made from the previous weeks interview, pass out journals (which I will explain) and have them take a written survey. This written survey which Sarah will include in her e mail, will be given twice, once at the beginning and once at the end. We decided that taking weight, body measurements, and blood pressure may not be helpful because we will not see a noticeable or accurately measurable difference in 8 weeks. Instead, by taking the intro and outro survey, we can see if people were able to incorporate the foods from the menu and lessons from the dietary guidelines into their daily life. For example, we are hoping that someone who only ate 2 servings of fruit at the beginning of the project will be able to incorporate 5 servings at the end and that the survey will reflect this change. From the survey, we will be able to make any conclusions about how successful the menu was or not. We also plan to give the health club members journals and pens so that they can write down if they follow the menu, if they like it, if they don’t follow it and why they don’t follow it. The journals will be really important for us to know why people don’t follow the menu and why they do. We will pass out the journals when we present the menu. The following week, after we’ve passed out the menu, journals, and intro survey we want to present to them the South Africa food based dietary guidelines so that they can understand what foods are important, why, and also why the menu is set up in a certain way to include the amounts of certain foods and types of foods. We also want to talk about portion size and perhaps even if time allows get some feed back on how the menu is going. If that doesn’t work out then we will wait until the next week to receive any sort of feed back.

Also work related, Sarah and I have already started to keep notes on how we are approaching the project in order to have it ready for when we write a final paper for Thandi before we leave.

So far, the only obstacle to our work plan is the fact that the attendance of the health club is sporadic and doesn’t look too promising since it is winter. Sarah and I were ready with the group interview questions today in hopes of getting started on the menu this weekend but since we were missing a lot of club members we had to post pone our interview until next week. So to solve this we’ve though of a few things. First, we’ve decided that instead of going in to Khayelitsha every day or even only twice a week to one of the health clubs (there are two health clubs, one meets on Monday and Wednesday and the other meets on Tuesday and Thursday), that we will only go in once a week in the hopes that the bulk of the members will decide to come when we are there and participate in the research work. We have also decided to provide an even stronger incentive to the club members for coming: lunch! Since it is cold and we are discussing food, we have provided the health club community workers with funds to make a vegetable soup for the club members in hopes that more will brave the cold weather for hot food. This will also give us a chance to share healthy recipes and to get to interact and talk with the health club members.