eLangeni Cooking Day!

Today was a big day.  Nicole used to be able to carry 20kg of donations and now she is capable of carrying 46kg.  She wanted me to alert the public.  She mentioned on more than one occasion that she didn’t realize we would be working so hard… I try to warn people that this work ain’t glamorous!  Today was a prime example.

This morning we went to eLangeni to help Suzie cook for the 634 children who attend school.  This is likely the 50^th time I have done this and my awe for our amazing cook never fades.  She lifts 200lb cookpots (think witches caldron) with ease and constantly scalds herself with things – like beans - that jump out of the boiling cookpot without flinching.  I, on the other hand, at 5 months pregnant was of little help today.  I cleaned the dishes and dished out the bean porridge while everyone else fetched huge buckets of water, extracted bean porridge from the cookpots and stirred the thick mixture (think cement) in the caldron large enough to serve 600 children.  The girls were shocked that Suzie does this alone every day we are not here.  She does everything from starting the fire for the Swazi “stove” to fetching all of the water that is necessary and carrying it to the kitchen to cooking, dishing, and serving.  Serving is the worst part.  Over the last 4 days, most of the children only ate on 1 of them.  Saturday and Sunday the kids are home without food and Monday our cook was sick (it turns out she pulled a muscle on Friday in her lower back from carrying these heavy things at work and it sent shooting pain in spasms up and down her right side.  She still suffers from it but does not want the children to starve).  So the kids only had lunch yesterday.  This being said, the kids were HUNGRY today and all of them were fighting to be in the front of the lunch line.  We even caught kids getting dishes, running off and hiding them, and then getting back in line to get more.  I don’t blame them. 

Then we went to deliver food to our Malindza high schoolers.  Nomalungelo and Nothando are likely our neediest children.  Their mother died years ago and now they live with a grandmother and many MANY children…one of which is Nothando’s one year old daughter.  (Teresa, the little boy who dissected the bug was there to greet us… I thought of you!!)When we dropped off the food and asked them if they had any more needs (if I were them, I could have listed at least 100!), they replied that they only needed soap and a skirt to wear to church. 

All 60 New Hope students were de-wormed today.  Unfortunately the Albendazole pills will give them diarrhea to flush out their stomach parasites, so hopefully they still like me after what I did to them!  Tomorrow will be a big day.  We are hosting a free clinic at our New Hope Primary School.  We are unsure of how many will come.  We’ve only alerted our students and their caretakers but from the buzzing around the village, I think many more are planning to come.  Hopefully our volunteer local nurse is prepared to be bombarded!  More tomorrow…