On the Front Lines

Xhosa round

The quaint Xhosa round that I stayed in during my time in Zithulele.

Published August 18, 2014, last updated on October 5, 2017 under Voices of DGHI

By Brittany Davis
Written on Aug. 12

Designing and testing medical devices behind a desk in the city of Pretoria is almost an entirely different world from where these bacteria tests will be used. I spent this past week in Zithulele, a rural town in the Eastern Cape. I met and got to know some of the people that will be using our device, asked for their input and preferences on our design and experienced firsthand rural living conditions in South Africa.

Due to the language barrier, hand signals and my limited Xhosa became my drug of choice when it came to communicating. The patience of the kind residents of Zithulele during my hand waving, pointing and stumbling over words that contained clicks was unwavering. The Zithulele residents who I spoke with brought up many design constraints for the device that I hadn’t initially thought of. These constraints included no power, no refrigeration, and to make this even more difficult, the hospital that did have power experienced frequent power outages. Although Zithulele has a fairly moderate temperature for most of the year, summer highs reach close to 80 F and winter lows dip into the lower 50s. This gives us a wide range of temperatures that our device must face and still be reliable throughout.

During my time in Zithulele, I was invited to stay with one kind family in their round. Rounds are beautifully decorated huts situated in the rural, rolling hills of the Eastern Cape. Throughout the evening, we shared a delicious, candlelit meal of rice, potatoes and gravy and laughed over my broken Xhosa and failed attempts to learn new words. This work trip was an eye-opening experience. It removed the curtain -- transforming potential end users of our technology from a number into people who have excellent input to help solve one of the world’s biggest problems.

      

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