Two Busy Months

Thembalethu Update
2 June 2007

A Saturday breather, and a chance to get some word back to you all finally. Thank you all so much for making it possible for me to get back here, to support this work. Your generosity has been amazing! God is good and I’m so grateful for your partnering in this work!

I can’t believe it’s already been two months since I arrived back here. After some initial settling back in, it’s seemed almost like I never left. Except of course for all the memories of lovely times that I spent with you all during a brief respite at home. Being back, my focus has definitely changed primarily to support the Home-Based-Care volunteers in caring for the sick and orphaned in their community. So, of course, the ways that I spend my time have shifted a lot. And, the team of people that help to oversee the project are a bunch of predominantly white South Africans, instead of Americans in partnership with Zulu teachers and field workers. Oh, and I suppose that I’ve been seeing a lot more HIV positive people on the brink of (or already into) full-blown AIDS. Oh, and I’ve joined the Winterton white bakkie brigade (bakkie means pick-up truck, and for some reason the majority of my farmers neighbors have white ones). And I’ve already attended too many funerals or mourned with far too many families of patients. But, despite all these changes, my favorite part continues to be working with the lovely Zulu people, and especially the ma’s and gogos who remember the age-old Zulu custom of ubuntu – caring for each other.

When I first got back to South Africa, I was a bit uncertain about how relations with the Winterton Methodist church would work. Afterall, I had just barely given them a project proposal, and didn’t have time for an in-person explanation before I left the country. So we communicated by email for the few months that I was in the US, and they remained absolutely solid in their commitment to the Home-Based-Care work, and certain of God’s leading in it. Yet, coming back and having a chance to explain the whole concept and, allay their concerns in person made a big difference.

After being here for a little more than a week, a meeting was set up to meet with the Church leadership committee. I sent out a prayer request for wisdom and discernment, for God’s unity in meeting together with the church. And God answered our prayers beyond my best imaginings.

At that meeting presented to the church leadership the same pictures, information, and explanation that I used in the United States. I wasn’t sure if I should cut some information out since it is their own neighbors that I was speaking about. I decided not to change a thing, and am glad of it. Multiple members said how convicted they were of their own apathy, their lack of understanding of the full gravity of their Zulu neighbors situation, and their renewed commitment to making the home-based-care project not just work, but thrive and continue – under the name Thembalethu “Our Hope”.

It was decided that the following Sunday, I should share the same presentation with the entire congregation. I think God must have been preparing me for this, as I had a couple practice opportunities in the US before I left. So I did the same presentation over again, this time integrating a challenge from the story of the Good Samaritan. I can’t say that things changed overnight, but I think people came away challenged, unable to walk away unaffected after being confronted by the situation in their neighboring village and an opportunity to help out.

Much like the blacks that I’ve come to know and love over the past few years, the whites also have their share of baggage from Apartheid. Until the end of the Apartheid system in 1994, the government, schools and even some churches spread an indoctrination of inferiority of the blacks in every aspect of their being, as well as spreading ‘swartgefaar’, the idea that blacks are by nature more violent, brutal, and criminal in nature. This indoctrination over generations to the whites continues to hold many in bondage, and fear reigns. But God is moving in their midst, and I’ll be taking some of them out with me in the next couple weeks and months to see for themselves the Zulu individuals and families that live so close to them, but are emotionally and socially and economically still so very far apart. Many citizens of the new South Africa have a lot of baggage from the past 200 years, and their own life stories that they need to unpack, and it is very exciting to see so much movement in the Winterton area to tear down the barriers in a big way.

From an HIV infected person to a pandemic

A crazy day with patients at the local Estcourt Hospital the other day opened my eyes to the reality of the health situation here.

I was bringing in a very sick HIV+ client to get her CD4 count redone. Sister Buthelezi (the nurse in charge of the Estcourt Hospital ARV rollout) came out to the pick-up to see the patient, to take her blood. She said she should be admitted to the hospital, so we waited for the doctor to come and check her, to write the admission letter. In the meanwhile, I saw another friend who was also coming into the ARV clinic to get her CD4 count retaken. I watched incredulously as box after box after box after box were being shuffled and placed under the clinic’s verandah. A stream of skeletal patients were struggling to move the 14kg (30.8 lbs) boxes, one at a time, from the back storage room, to the entrance. Three trips per patient – three big and awkward boxes of food to assist them: rice, beans, maize meal, immune booster porridge, salt, sugar, powdered milk are some of the contents. Some were lucky and had brought helpers with them to transport the boxes, those who didn’t were left out from assistance, unless they had money to pay for private transport. Once they made the three trips with their three boxes out to the ARV clinic entrance, they still had to find a way to get these three boxes to the hospital entrance, and, then to the taxi-bus stop, and then through the taxi-bus transfer area, then on the new taxi-bus, then on their taxi to their home areas. If they were able to make it that far, they could call additional family or friends, or the random child to come and help them carry the boxes up the dirt roads to their homes.

What lunatic thought this would be a good way to help the sick? Skeletal patients everywhere carried boxes from one side to the other. Three in all, because the shipment from the Department of Health had been delayed, and so three months worth of ARV nutritional support boxes arrived at once, and were distributed at once because of the lack of storage at the clinic. I felt many eyes on me, trying to figure out where I had come from, whether I might be able to help them cart their boxes home. Unfortunately for them, it was a very long day at the hospital, and I left too late for them to get my help.

I returned a couple of months later to hear that all the boxes had run out, and those who have become dependent on the food assistance are now left without any food to take home with them.

While I was still mulling over this crazy system, I was rushing all over the hospital looking for a gurney to get my very sick patient admitted to the ward. There was none in sight, and I discovered that the nurse in training I had sought assistance from at first, had run off instead. I cruised throughout the out-patient department, the emergency area, and through various wards searching for a gurney. Skeletal patients were everywhere.

While I know that it is a mass generalization, I have learned take keen notice in people’s appearance. Most every patient that I’ve taken to have tested for HIV so far has the same gaunt, sunken-eye look that I see all over the streets and pathways, and corridors of the hospital. And, without any real evidence for my assumptions, I saw them everywhere. Laying on benches, struggling to sit on wooden pews, sitting in wheelchairs, and gathering up the strength to walk the vast distances of the hospital. Likely AIDS cases were everywhere. In fact, I started to understand just what the AIDS epidemic here is doing to the health sector.

I normally end up feeling a strong sense of frustration and anger toward the public health system at the incompetence, inefficiency, and apathy I have noticed, and hear repeatedly from patients and caregivers. For once, I was able to see the huge impact that AIDS was having on the health sector. The hospitals and clinics are being flooded by countless emaciated HIV+ patients in every clinic, with every possible queue with every possible ailment. They go in with secondary infections and diseases (TB, pneumonia, terrible body rashes, meningitis, oral thrush, weight loss and STDs) and get treatment for these. This pandemic of AIDS together with a global brain drain and compounded nursing shortage that heavily pulls away doctors and nurses to wealthier countries where the pay is many times higher. For these ailments, sometimes it’s only calamine lotion and an asprin that the patients walk away with. More careful, passionate nurses and doctors refer them to get an HIV test, recognizing the possibility that all of these things have a primary cause.

And yet, anti-fungal cream on the blistered, boiled hands of an HIV+ boy is like putting a bandage on a broken arm, and not looking at the deeper problem. Many patients fear to get tested, and have difficulty accepting the possibility, then the reality that they have HIV. The AIDS epidemic is far from limited to the patients of the clinics and hospitals. The very same nurses and doctors are suffering a common fate. Memorial Services are held regularly to honour the life of a staff member who’s passed away.

A wave of sorrow and understanding flooded over me as I realized the gravity of the problem, that it truly leaves no sector, no life untouched. The sea of HIV continues to rise in this part of the world, seemingly with no end in sight…

Revival in Winterton

And yet, exciting things are happening in Winterton. Just last year a number of people gathered together multiple times to pray for revival in the Champagne Valley and Central Drakensberg region that include the small farming town. It is exciting to see how it looks like God is answering these prayers, though in unexpected ways.

A network of Christian people and organizations that are community-minded and Christ-centered are gathering momentum and coming together: My good friend Sofi, who is doing much the same home-based care support work that I am but in a smaller village called AmaSwazi, recently and quite vibrantly became a Christian. The local Matthew 25 orphan feeding project looks as if it is in the process of being revamped and becoming more community-minded. A new holistic and community-minded Christian organization has taken over the helm of a local orphan foster home. A lovely English couple has moved into town to integrate judeo-Christian morals and character-building (learning from the Jesus film and other materials) into local public schools. The Microfinance for Youth project continues under the Jeskes, a lovely American couple, to bring opportunity and entrepreneurship training to orphaned youth and caregivers. Economic opportunities are developing for Zulu artisans to develop their skills and market their high-quality woven and beaded creations. And Youth With A Mission (YWAM) making Winterton a discipleship training and outreach base for Christian youth from all over the world. And even better than all of these individual initiatives is what looks to be their coming together under the common umbrella of Winterton churches called Simunye. And a Friday morning Bible study in which many of us meet together to share our experiences and learn together about God’s word. We are all very eager to see how God continues to work in this community and bring hope, love and opportunity to this area that for so long has had so little.

So, this is a novel in itself. Thank you so much for your support!

God bless! Unkulunkhulu akubusisu!

Betsy