Volunteer SHAWCO Medical Clinics Begin in Cape Town South Africa

For the most part Cape Town is like Sydney, except the breath taking mountains that watch over the city, speckled brown and green with tufts of lush foliage. In some parts the ocean and mountains even flank one another closely like lovers. The Western Cape’s bitterly cold beaches of the Atlantic ocean, make my beloved Bondi seem practically bath temperature, make swimming less of a past-time here and more an adrenalin-seeking sport.

The view from Table Mountain over cape Town

Not all work... some time for yoga and hiking mountains

The tarred oversized streets are peppered with people, rather than overwhelmed by them. The large diversity of skin colours flavours the streets with the threads of ancient tribes of Africa. There are black, coloured, Cape Malay, and white South African folk, and of course foreigners. I am no longer called Mzungu, I am now called sister, sisi or mama.

Heading out of town past the airport you can peruse the heartbreaking sprawl of the shanty-towns lining the freeway. Makeshift corrugated iron, timber, and plastic informal dwellings house massive communities of life, connected by an overhead spiders web of illegal electric wires milking the legitimate mother power lines. The townships are a reminder of the disparity of wealth here, a remnant of the Group Areas Act, founded in 1950, forming the cornerstone of apartheid. This Act demanded that each race be settled in certain areas and has been somewhat preserved to this day, unsurprising since apartheid was only curtailed in 1994.

The townships and their illegal wires

Less profoundly, there are some subtle differences between Cape Town and Sydney, Woolworths here equals home’s David Jones (somewhere that I have been spending quite a lot of my time). After being deprived of a supermarket for months in Zanzibar then spending half of my time here in the downtrodden slums, I have all but moved in to the Woolworths down the road on my time off, finding it quite therapeutic to peruse the isles and clean surrounds, exercising my advanced human right to cook for myself.

The Aussie SHAWCO volunteer student Team minus one

My second home here is the yoga studio that I’ve nestled into. The third is a white Capetonian bunk bed house in Rosebank, filled with twelve medical students of all shapes and sizes.  I guess it’s what college would have been like if I had ever lived in residence. The place hums with lively conversation, the churning of the ever-running washing machine, the chime of pots clanging in the crowded kitchen, and full ball nova 9.69 radio tunes imported from Australia via someone’s iPhone. It is littered with stethoscopes, lab coats, medical text books, decaying bowls of yesterday’s tuna salad hidden under the coffee table, wine glasses, newspapers, lap tops and tourist pamphlets. It’s nothing like the solo life I left behind in a fastidiously organised, often pin-drop silent, Tamarama apartment; where there was an entire pantry shelf reserved for an elaborate herbal tea library. But it’s exactly as it should be.

Here in Cape Town large blue and white Sydney buses are largely replaced by mini van taxis that beep and heckle every poor unsuspecting pedestrian that tries, heaven forbid, to walk down the street. The amount of times I’ve been asked if I walk to go to ‘Wynberg’ by the gauchi of the mini-bus who hustles passengers with his head hanging out the side of the vehicle like the tongue of an exhausted Labrador. I’m tempted to venture to Wynberg one of these days and see the impressive collection of mini-bus taxis that gather there, as it seems to be where they all are headed. I imagine it as some kind of mini-bus heaven where rastas smoke their ganja and mini-buses go once they have completed enough cycles of re-incarnation that they can be liberated from their duties and blend with the universal mini-bus consciousness.

So you can imagine this backdrop of Cape Town, hanging behind all of the stories I’m about to tell you.

Five days a week I accompany 11 other volunteer international students, a handful of volunteer local students, one pharmacist, one doctor, and one driver to the townships on a bus labelled with the acronym SHAWCO. This denotes The Students Health and Welfare Centres Organisation. It delivers medical care and education. To borrow from their website SHAWCO is a dynamic, innovative and passionate student-run NGO based at UCT, constantly striving to improve the quality of life for individuals in developing communities within the Cape Metropolitan area.

The patients wait 'patient'ly in the dust and sun

SHAWCO was founded in 1943 by Andrew Kinnear, a medical student who was moved to action by the need which he saw in the impoverished communities of Cape Town. What started off as a one-man initiative quickly grew into one of the country’s largest student volunteer organisations, now boasting over 1200 volunteers running over 15 health and education projects in 5 SHAWCO centres as well as other locations around the Cape Metropolitan area.

We work as long as needed to see all of the patients that crouch and sit by our mobile clinic buses in the townships. Some clinics are by day, others by night. We provide a free service, so we see genuine and less genuine cases. There are patients who cannot afford to travel to central health care facilities who really benefit from our service, and many tragic emergency cases. On the other hand there are bus-loads of patients worried by innocuous heat rashes that develop when they wear a skiers garb in the 40 degree heat, and those who just want a medical certificate to get off work. 


On our paediatric clinic we also see a lot of ‘adult’ looking children. It’s not uncommon to finish seeing a child and when gratuitously asked if there’s anything else the mother shoots ten presenting complaints at you starting with “my vagina is itchy”. It’s not quite what you want to hear when you’re craving lunch, but it’s incredibly satisfying at the end of the day when it’s all done. The clinics are an incredible platform for public health screening and we often end up counselling patients about basic nutrition, hygiene, dental care, exercise, available screening tests such as pap smears, and performing HIV counselling and testing.

The Prof in his 80's is my inspiration! A compassionate paediatrician and GP, dedicated elevating the health of the masses

Shaun, my boyfriend, volunteering on the clinics

That’s an intro to Cape town. Some heartwarming and heart breaking stories of our SHAWCO clinic patients to come. I promise.