| So, we are reaching the end of preservice training and everyone appears to be holding up relatively well. We leave on Monday for Mbabane where we will be staying for several days to swear in as volunteers and to purchase items we will need for our new home sites. I expect to have ample time then to write about training and to post more pictures. I now have a cell phone but, given that it costs about $1.50/minute to call the US, it is unlikely that any of you will hear my voice anytime soon. I have learned that I can receive email on my phone but I am not sure if I can reply. Someone will have to try it and let me know if they get a reply. My phone email is 6175473@mtnconnect.co.sz and brevity will be greatly appreicated. It may be necessary to precede the phone number with the country code which is 268- some emails get through without it and some don't. I spent a few days at the orphanage (where I will be living) in Hlatikulu a couple weeks ago and I think it will be a very interesting 2 years there. Hlati is just beautiful, but then so is the whole country. And we ate embarassing amounts of food on Thanksgiving at the ambassador's house. More to come... It really is this grim 12/6/04 My sister sent me this article from the San Diego paper: AIDS merciless to southern Africa |
It killed the mayor's daughter. It has killed one-fifth of the 60 employees of the town's biggest businessman. It has claimed an estimated one in eight teachers, several health workers and two of 10 counselors who teach prostitutes about protected sex. One of the 13 municipal workers has died of AIDS. Another is about to. A third is HIV-positive.
By one hut-to-hut survey in 2003, one in four households on the town's poorer side lost someone to AIDS in the preceding year. One in three had a visibly ill member.
That is just the dead and the dying. There is also the world they leave behind. AIDS has turned one in 10 Lavumisans into an orphan. It has spawned street children, prostitutes and dropouts. It has thrust grandparents and sisters and aunts into the unwanted roles of substitutes for dead fathers and mothers. It has bred destitution, hunger and desperation among the living.
It has the appearance of a biblical cataclysm, a thousand-year flood of misery and death. In fact, it is all too ordinary. Tiny Lavumisa, population 2,000, is the template for a demographic plunge taking place in every corner of southern
Across the region, AIDS has reduced life expectancy to levels not seen since the 1800s. In six sub-Saharan nations, the United Nations estimates, the average child born today will not live to 40.
In
Epidemics typically single out the aged and young – the weak, not those at society's core. So what happens to a society when its fulcrum – its mothers and fathers, teachers, nurses, farmworkers, bookkeepers, cooks, clerks – die in their prime?
Part of the answer lies in Lavumisa, where two visitors spent five weeks recently talking to more than 60 residents, following the terrible ripples that an epidemic is sending through the community. Sickness leads to death, death leads to destitution, destitution worsens a host of social ills, from illiteracy to prostitution to abandoned babies. Multiply a single illness or death scores of times, and a town like Lavumisa begins to unravel.
Today, Lavumisa's schools are collapsing. Crime is climbing. Medical clinics are jammed. Family assets are sold to fend off hunger. The sick are dying, sometimes alone, because they are too many, and the caretakers are too few.
Much of this is occurring because adults whose labors once fed children and paid school fees and sustained families are dead. Lavumisa's lost generation of adults has reached beyond the grave, robbing survivors of their aspirations, reducing promising lives to struggles for existence.
Nkuthula Madlopha, 16, wanted to be a police officer. Instead, next year she will till her grandparents' fields, filling in for her dead parents. Her brother will herd livestock.
Their grandmother, Vayillina Madlopha, wanted a quiet old age. Instead, at 80, she is a new mother.
"I thought my daughters-in-law would be serving me food, washing for me and cleaning the yard," she said. "Now I must start afresh."
Ntokozo, 11, wanted to be a third-grader. Instead, he lies on the floor of his one-room hut, his knees swollen like baseballs and his mouth pitted with sores. His mother, who died in May, infected him with HIV, either during her pregnancy or later as he helped tend her oozing sores.
His sister, Nkululeko Masimula, 26, wanted a job. "I wanted to have my own business, to be a hairdresser or a wholesaler," she said. Instead, she tends her brother and their 61-year-old grandmother. She sells the family's chickens to raise money for food. Finding the $20 a month required to take her brother to the nearest anti-retroviral drug site, 60 miles away, is a pipe dream.
Dido Khosa, 9, wants his mother back. "She used to cook food, wash my clothes, do things for me," he said, sobbing. Instead, he describes a life of regular beatings by his father and his father's girlfriend and periodic escapes to the homes of neighbors.
Delisile Nyandeli, slim and pretty, wanted her own home and family. Instead, she cares for her orphaned sisters and brothers and for the orphaned children of two sisters who died of AIDS and whose husbands fled. At age 20, she is a mother to nine children besides her own boy.
"Today, when I was cleaning this house," she said, "I thought about it: If my mother were alive, she would be the one doing this. Because when my sisters don't have any pencils or other things they need for school, they come to me.
"And I can't help them."
Baked by drought, with a single paved street, a gas station, two liquor stores, two bars and a wretched crafts stand for tourists speeding from the adjacent
A mostly rainless decade has discouraged most farmers from planting maize, the staple crop, much less the cotton that once underpinned the local economy. Many survive on homegrown chickens and pigs, donations from the World Food Program and the kindness of relatives who work across the border or in
The town does not keep death statistics. Most people quietly bury relatives in their yards or nearby fields rather than buy a cemetery plot. But Mzweleni Dlamini, the acting chief for Lavumisa and the surrounding region, does not need a tally to tell him the toll is very high.
Two years ago, he shifted his regular meeting with subordinates from weekends to Tuesdays because Saturdays and Sundays were consumed by funerals. Now he has given permission for weekday funerals because there are too many dead for the traditional weekend services alone.
With the dead gone, it is the impoverished survivors' turn to suffer.
At
Nomfundo, a 15-year-old seventh-grader, made the four-mile trek home from school one recent day with her brother, Ndabendele, 10. He carried his books in a torn plastic bag. She sported the shaved head customary for girls in mourning.
Their 34-year-old mother, a domestic worker, died Aug. 29; their father died the previous December. Care of the children has fallen to their grandmother, Esther, 53, who has been jobless for 14 years.
Since the illnesses began, she has sold four of the family's eight goats to raise money for food.
"Wheesh! Now I can feel the hardship," Nomfundo said. "Who is going to pay my school fees? Even the clothes. Where am I going to get them?" She tugged at her school uniform skirt, riddled with holes and hemmed several times to hide tears.
"I feel small," she said. "We used to have track suits. Now we no longer have track suits. Other kids say, 'Oh, now you don't have a track suit. Not even shoes! Now you are on the same level as us.' "
Actually, the two children are headed lower. Unbeknownst to them, their grandmother has tested positive for HIV, apparently contracting the virus while dressing her daughter's bleeding sores. Esther Simelane has kept the news from Nomfundo and her brother to spare them further trauma.
Should Nomfundo manage to stay in school another year, she will move up to
Elphas Z. Shiba, the headmaster, keeps careful track of his 366 students in stacks of ledgers.
Shiba can say that at the beginning of this year, Ndabazezwe High had 40 students who had lost at least one parent. Nine months later, there were 73, 20 of whom had lost both father and mother, nearly all of whom are desperately poor. A decade ago, Shiba said, the school had perhaps five orphans, none of them needy.
Both the primary and the high school are staggering under the burden of feeding and educating a growing army of orphans who, by and large, cannot pay the school fees. The state has pledged to pay to educate orphans, but so far it has picked up but half the Lavumisa primary-school fees. Shiba said the high school was getting a mere $15 of the $100 a year it costs to educate each orphan.
Wish list 12/20/04
If any of you want to try to track down donors/sponsors, we could use the following:
30 blankets for orphanage for winter- very cold here in winter (jun, jul, aug)
A sponsor for t-shirts for Hlatikuly Youth in Action Against HIV/AIDS. This is a very active group that is staffed completely by volunteers, some or many of whom are HIV+ and who are willing to be open about their status to help others.
Computers for local HIV center and for orphanage
projector for hiv education purposes
will add more later
A day in the life 12/21/04
I spent the morning at the voluntary counseling and testing center (VCT) with the niece of one of the women in my community. Imagine the drabbest, most rundown clinic you have visited or seen and then imagine something worse. Imagine something that was once yellow paint that now is cracked, peeling, and blotchy with dirt, some other color peeking through between the cracks. People waiting to be tested sit in the hallway on the floor or on a dilapidated metal bench for an hour or so. Ironically, the bench was once painted with festive colors, each metal slat a different color. Now it is some twisted version of what it once was, like a reflection in a carnival mirror, and barely functional. The group is herded into a small room where they receive about one hour’s worth of education/information on HIV and AIDS. After the hour they are moved back into the hallway where they wait to be tested one by one. The young woman I am with speaks little English and I little SiSwati. She has been very sick for a year. She is rail thin. As she hunches forward, I can count the vertebrae climbing up her back; her shoulders are sharp angles. She is young and lovely except that there is no buffer zone between her skin and her bones. It is odd to note that her fingernails are quite long and were once polished red. They are splotched now, probably 6 months or so since polish was last applied, and she is too weak to care. She has two children and no husband. I am unable to ascertain if there ever was one. Her children are not sick….yet. They are 3 and 5, if memory serves me. It takes that long often to start showing symptoms. Everyone sits staring blankly, emotionless. It is like that all over, this striking lack of emotional expression, as if everyone is shellshocked. I ask her if she is afraid, “kwesaba?”. She says “yes.” You would never know. She goes back in for her test and I wait with the others on the bench. She comes out and I look for some sign of expression. There is none. She hands me the paper, but we both knew already. She is to return the following Wednesday to have blood drawn for her CD4 count. In Swaziland the antiretroviral therapy is free but is not given unless you are already pretty sick or your CD4 count is below 200 (from a norm of about 1200). I think she will qualify, if she does not die first. I will meet her again next Wednesday and wait with her, exchanging nothing. She must walk a few hours just to get to the clinic and I wonder if she will make it. I also wonder how she will be able to comply with the ARV therapy if she must walk that distance every week just to be treated. This morning I read that recent testing in my area shows a 45% infection rate for pregnant women (that would be 16 and over). Welcome to Swaziland.
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