Monday, October 25, 2010

July - August 2005

The girls 7/2/05
It’s funny, there’s so much to write about the girls and yet it is so difficult to put pen to paper and share our lives.  I think they should never have put me here.  I love these girls too much and even now it breaks my heart to think of leaving them.  It was awful at first and for quite some time I wondered if the Peace Corps hadn’t made a big mistake in my placement.  Although I had worked with kids before, it had always been teenage boys.  And with Joel in Petaluma, Baker Street was always full of big, lanky adolescent males, lounging around my living room like big Labrador retrievers.  So when they told me I would be placed in an orphanage with ~25 girls, I was not sure how to feel. It was slow going in the beginning. There are, of course, the language difficulties.  But, beyond that, it is not my style to jump right in and start playing games or being the “bestest of friends.”  I was a stranger in their midst and it was their home.  I respected that.  And they were noisy.  There are actually 23 girls plus the house mother and her two children, a boy and a girl.  And the girls love to sing and shout and laugh, all day long, at the top of their lungs.  Being a relatively quiet and private person, especially in unfamiliar surroundings, I felt that I was ill-placed.  But I sat with it.  And sat with it.  And sat with it.  And slowly our worlds began to converge on each other.  I noticed it when I realized that the sound of pounding feet past my window at 3:30 in the morning, as the older girls go to begin preparing the morning meal, had changed from an annoyance to a sound that now leaves me lying in bed grinning.  There is no better way for the day to greet me than the sound of pounding feet past my window.  And I realized their laughter, constant and loud, now filled the air rather than invading it.
The youngest girl is Ncobile (the “c” pronounced as a click).  She is 8 chronologically but developmentally about 5 or 6.  When she was 6, her mother threw her in the fire.  She spent a year in the hospital and no one thought she would live. She has been at the orphanage for about a year.  Her backside, from lower back to upper thigh, is one solid mangled piece of scar tissue.  And those are the scars you can see…  She is tiny and reminds me of a little bird.  She comes to my rondeval three times a day so I can supplement her food, which for all the girls consists of little more than a daily ration of beans and cornmeal, with protein enhanced powdered milk and a vitamin enhanced Ovaltine-like substance.  The other girls say she is improving.  It is hard for me to tell.

And Busie, god I love Busie.  She is about 10, small and tough, and generally in some state of undress, her dislike of clothing underscoring a touch of wildness or an unwillingness to be tamed that appeals to me.  It speaks to some spark in me that still defies convention despite my many years on the planet.  Busie’s mother died when she was about 5.  Her father is alive but she can’t live with him.  She said he was mean to her.  When a Swazi child says someone was mean to him or her, a statement like that from children who are routinely and legally caned and beaten at school and accept it without complaint, you must know they have been badly treated.  Additionally, sexual abuse of young girls is common in Swaziland, occurring routinely at home as well as in the schools, and it is my understanding that most of these girls have suffered this at one or the other location.  There are generally about 2 stories a week in the Swazi Times about another teacher or headmaster who has been accused of or found molesting children- two times a week in a country the size of Rhode Island.  And the abuse at home is not generally reported.  In the rural areas children and wives are considered property.  When something is yours,you can do what you want.  But back to Busie.  I love her. 

And this is just the first two.

A mother’s dilemma 7/26/05
I just learned from the housemother, who lives at the orphanage with her 7 year old son and 11 year old daughter, that her son must be gone by the new year or they will all 3 have to leave. This is a woman who lost her husband several years ago, was made to leave his homestead by his family, moved in with her brother, who abused her children, and sister-in-law who told her to leave, and finally found a place with the orphanage.  Like most women here, she owns nothing and has no opportunity to improve her situation. She is uneducated and gets the equivalent of USD40/month for running the orphanage.  She has resorted to looking for orphanages to place her son, upon whom she dotes, so that she and her daughter are not thrown out to make their way on the streets.  What the hell kind of choice is that????


Just 21 8/16/05
She’s 21.  Her baby died 2 years ago, surviving only a couple weeks of life.  The community home-based caregiver came to ask me to see her last night.  She assured me it was not “too far”, but far seems to have a different meaning here.  We take our shoes off as we enter the tiny, dark room in a mud hut that has become so familiar here.  It is dusk and I can barely see inside the room.  A child of 5 or 6 sits on a makeshift bed.  A body lies face down on a mat on the floor. It is she.  They tell me to sit on a mat a few feet away but I take a place by her head instead.  I can feel the heat rising off her body.  A thermometer would have only served to scare me more.  She could barely lift her head up and I wondered how she could lay like that, this grown young woman, belly and face down on the hard concrete floor.  But she has been like this for 2 months now, face down on the floor.  She has been sick much longer.  I tell them I will hire transport in the morning, first to the VCT for HIV testing and then to the outpatient clinic.  I have someone walk me home so I can send back a few tablets to bring her fever down and some gator aid to rehydrate her.  She is incapable of keeping food down. The oral thrush is so thick it would seem she is talking through cotton balls.  I wonder at the awful stigma of this disease that allows a mother, her mother, to watch her 21 year old daughter come to this before she calls out for help.
This morning, not unexpectedly, the taxi driver charges extra because I am white and because she is sick.  These are not taxis, as we know them.  Rather, men with old, beat up personal vehicles park at a corner in town and wait to be hired by anyone in need of a ride somewhere. 
It was cold and rainy and the wait at the BVCT was not long.  The results were not unexpected; she is to show up next Wednesday to have blood drawn for a CD4 count.  She is positive.  Pity she did not test before the baby died, or before she gave birth.  43% of pregnant women here are HIV+ and most are still not testing, nor are they being encouraged to test by the prenatal clinic staff even though a single dose of Nevarapine can prevent transmission to the infant.  The wait at the OPD clinic is less successful.  The doctor for exam room #3, where we’ve been assigned, does not arrive until 3, and we are number 28 in his line.  He has been working straight since 8 and has probably delivered a fair number of babies, done a couple surgeries, and made rounds on the ward. 
She is prescribed some medication for whatever opportunistic infections she has and is instructed to come in for a chest x-ray as soon as possible.  The doctor agrees she should be taken to the ward, but there is no space.
I help them to the hired transport and send them home 20 rand (the price of the taxi) and with assurances I will come see her soon.  An old woman on the corner who knows me says, “ah, Nozipho, thank you,” and suddenly I am swallowing back tears I did not know were there.


Esibhedlela 8/26/05

I went to see her on sunday.  When I arrived at the wretched little hut, a group of local church people were praying and singing over her, the men just outside the door and the women on mats inside the room.  I was invited to come in and sit down.  I sat next to her again and held her head.  She needed more than prayer, she needed a hospital.  The group was willing to pray but, piling in their old pickup, they were not willing to transport her to the hospital.  Her sister walked to town to once again hire transport.  We got her to the hospital and fortunately there was room on the ward. 
I visited her Monday and she looked much better.  She was still not eating so we bought her something to drink.
She died last night.

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