An ordinary weekend?

This weekend, I met one of the most powerful people in the world! Angela Merkel the German chancellor visited my hospital as part of her African tour.

It was mayhem, with reporters, and cameramen jostling to get her photo and avoid being trampled on by her 20 plus entourage as she swept into the hospital.

She was here to visit the "Hope" centre, a German-NGO funded project that does community HIV things. An elective student working at Hope had tipped us all off that she might be coming a few hours before. And so a cold, quiet Saturday afternoon suddenly became very exciting. We put on our white coats and they seemed to blag us through all security measures, and even us get us sitting a few rows to the side of Angela in "Hope's" power point presentation.

I didn't understand anything she said but she seemed very clever and energetic. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to ask she was going to meet the 12 billion dollar gap in the Global Fund for AIDS TB and Malaria (though to be fair she did give 10 billion dollars to the fund with Brown last week). The German elective students were very happy to meet her (see picture!). One got interviewed by national radio.

We also met Oliver Beirkoff (scored against England to win Germany Euro 1996 - I had to ask i know nothing about football) and the German finance secretary. I also met the SABC's (South African Broadcasting Corporation) presidential reporter. He has interviewed Thabo Mbeki countless times, so had fascinating chat about AIDS denilism and the Zimbabwe issue. To follow on from the earlier blog post about Mkeki he may be more misunderstood than we give him credit for. The reporter thought Mbeki felt he had been unfairly misinterpreted when he highlighted the links between AIDS and poverty years ago and no longer spoke about AIDS because he was reluctant to be misinterpreted again.