Day 11:
It’s been a few days since I last blogged, don’t worry – we’re
still alive! On Wednesday we were busy
with our new team arriving and yesterday was a national holiday so I decided to
give myself the day off since I am at least 7/30ths Swazi… Here’s our past few
days in a nutshell:
Wednesday was an awesome introduction of Swaziland for our
new Purdue students and Maureen – Kait’s mom. We went directly from the
Johannesburg airport to the wholesale shop to buy more food care packages for
our child-headed households in eLangeni (thanks Mitali/FOODOM). Then we trekked to eLangeni to spend time at
the secondary school before taking one of our newest students Sanele M home
from school to deliver his food package.
We’re each carrying an arm-full of rice, beans, oil, brown sugar, canned
fish, soap, etc and he asks us to bring them inside to unload. We walk through the door of a dark
traditional Swazi home, and I hear something just to my right. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I see on a
blanket on the floor, is his teenaged severely handicapped brother smiling
enthusiastically and waving to us. Sanele,
a highschooler, takes care of him and his other much younger cousins/siblings –
and does an amazing job! Until last year
Sanele worked every moment he wasn’t in school helping to build some of the
structures at our secondary school to raise money for his school fees. We told him last year that he has enough to
do simply studying and taking care of his younger siblings so if he promised to
keep working hard, Give Hope, Fight Poverty would sponsor his schooling. As we were leaving his home, he wanted to
give us a painting of a cow grazing underneath a tree that he made for us. We insisted on buying it and told him that
someday when he’s famous, we will have had the first original Sanele
piece! Then we piled back into our
Nissan X-Trail and pulled out of the small village, and I silently I wished
there were more resources for mentally and physically handicapped people in
Swaziland. A life on a dirty blanket in
a dark room alone is no life at all…
Thursday was a national holiday so it was filled with all
play and no work. We went hiking on the
mountain tops in the morning with a couple of our local friends and then did a Swazi
Open Air Aerobics class with instructor Sthembiso (Baby T) in the evening. In between, Catherine (Purdue volunteer) did
her own workout on the driveway while the rest of us shoveled cookies, potato
chips, and cheese sandwiches down our throats.
When I woke up this morning in severe pain from the butt-kicking I
received at Swazi Zumba last night, I realized that I’d better start joining
Catherine (a Purdue University fitness instructor) in her daily workouts so my
(puny) muscles don’t entirely turn into cheese sandwich mush while I am here in
Swaziland…
The girls went to Lobamba Clinic to deliver medical
supplies, cooked and served lunch to the 634 eLangeni primary school kids, and
then went on safari at Hlane Royal National Park today. I spent the day with Bill Clinton’s
foundation here in Mbabane. They are
doing miraculous things. They’ve reduced
the mother to child transmission of HIV/AIDS from 20% to only 4%. They are pushing universal access to drugs
for all ages but they have already successfully changed the policy for
children. Instead of children having to
reach full on AIDS, they can receive free treatment until the age of 5 despite
their virus load. This is keeping the
children healthier longer and seems to increase their future tolerance to the
very caustic drugs. And soon they will reveal
a universal testing program for 9 month old babies (which is when the babies
are already at the clinics for their free measles vaccination). It is vital for babies to be tested and
started on treatment immediately as most of the children who are positive will
die before their 2nd birthday.
Clinton’s team is searching for someone to help implement this program
which was the purpose of our meeting today.
It was only an unofficial interview at this point, but even if I were to
be offered the position – it would definitely shake the previous plans my fiancé
and I have made for our immediate future. Instead of summer wedding bells and buying a
house to settle down, we’d be spending a 6 month honeymoon hiatus in the rural
villages of Swaziland where children dance and people sing Hallelujah. Praying hard for the answer… and missing you
like crazy Tyler.
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