Bye Vusi

Be still and know that I am God. A hymn we sang monotonously at my primary school. Rethinking it, just refreshes the humble and honest memories of being a young lad, who was at that time more worried that he hasn't done his homework rather than wrestling with God. The Lord just laid this Psalm in my heart this morning and the entire day as I had woken up to the tragic news of a young friend of mine who lost his battle to AIDS. Filled with so many questions at first, all unanswered with only one answer that for me, sealed our debacle - Be still and know that I am God. 'Don't question my ruling, my decision. As I have given life which brings glorious joys and praise to my name, surely I don't deserve judgement and curses when I take my creation to a place I have consecrated as Holy. Do you not trust me with him. I have taken him from a world of mayhem, evil, sin, destruction, imperfection, impurity and all that is detestable to me. Do you not think for a second he would want to be with me, away from a dependence of a cocktail of drugs, away from a society that has rejected him due to his parents sins, away from his fickle body that lacks nourishment! Be still my son and know that I am God. His surely peaceful where he is, so have peace where you are my son'

Bafana

Just so you know

This week has been quite a highlight in that:

1. Had a number of meetings with potential supporters who are praying ofr the ministry for next year and some still praying about financially giving towards my internship. What I get is that alot of people, more especially in the black community, find my plans quite disturbing to say the least. The first thing they ask is A) How much do you earn B) What your parents saying about this C) Are you really sure that you want to do this rather than going to study. So ye, I'm getting good in answering those type of questions, hahahaha.

2. Just returned from a kids play at the Johannesburg Civic Theatre and what the play was all about is dealing with life issues mostly such as caring and looking after our environment and living with HIV/AIDS. The great thing about this is that most of proceedings from the shows (4 shows in total) go towards the Lambano Sanctuary which is an NGO housing in 5 shelters children affected and infected by HIV.

3. Spent the week with my discipler, Anele, as he was in JHB raising support - learnt alot from him during the course of the week.

4. Greatest news ever, received a call that I have been accepted to 2 different Honours programs (namely Medical Microbiology at the UKZN Medical School as well as Microbiology at UKZN Westville Campus) that I had applied during the course of the year. There is no question about it, will be deferring those for 2013 after my internship with CRU.

5. Have been spending the week with family - now im ready to head back to get to work.

6. Missing my crazy CRU family in Durban.

 Bafana

K|RITH Genetics Course

30 students were selected to attend the K RITH Mycobacterium Genetics Course at the Westville Campus which ran from 18th to the 29th of July 2011. With the great opportunity granted to spend the whole day with Dr's and Prof' who are high up the Medical Research ladder such as Dr. Bisshai (the new Director of K RITH), as well as representatives from Pittsburg University, Havard Medical School, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, as well as Albert Einstein School of Medicine.

The main aim of this course was to introduce to students isolation, characterization and visualization of novel bacteriophages; gene discovery and gene annotations; construction of defined mutants of mycobacteria; as well as research methods, experimental design, and data interpretation. In addition to that there took place laboratory and bioinformatics studies with a series of lectures in microbial genetics and drug discovery in microbial genetics and drug discovery by expects in the field with all of these seminars being streamed on the internet by the school.

This fun-filled expedition was more than just about students finding samples and isolating phages, it was like a whole new world of discovery of how and what phages do in their environment, how they behave and how we can use them to manipulate certain systems with hopeful results of curing TB. With a diverse selection of students from 3rd year students, to postgradute students from different levels of qualification to lab technicians and medical practitioners, young and slender - this course was the epitomy of educational discovery. At the end of the course more than 40 novel phages had been discovered and named and placed into a database that collects all international information on discovered phages - putting South Africa and its discoverers on the map!

What was more exciting for the students participating in this course was not the food (although it did play a major role in the extention of the PhageHunters shelf life) it was the opportunity granted to submit work to GenBank which is a database of annotated genomes used by scientists all over the world in their research projects when working with genes (compare this to a house than stores all the information one would need to know about a genome of a bacteria).

My accomplishments at the end of the two weeks was:

1. Sequence annotation of a new specie of a virus

2. A GenBank author/publisher

3. Discovery of 7 novel mycobacteriophages

4. 4 of my phages have been named and deposited into an international database for m.phages and I named them Cruu, Ukukhanya, Bafana, and Ntando (the links will send you to their webpages on the database)

Really stoked about that!

B's desk

inspirational story of an inspirational woman

she is one in a million. with a passion for the orphans and families infected and affected by hiv/aids, she has brought to some of the kids of ntuzuma what they had always lacked. she was recently interview by kwch 12, a local news broadcaster on her work down here in south africa.



she is our Gogo Penny Dugan