Pretty in Pink

This little girl caught my eye on a recent day of home visits with the Home-Based Care Team. On a busy homestead full of other children and adults, she sat off in a corner all by herself.

I can get most kids to crack a smile pretty easily, but she was shy and reserved, lost in her own world -- which made me like her even more.

I gave her some candy, which is usually a fail-safe means of getting a smile, but still no go from this serious young girl. I left her to her thoughts and walked over to help Scott. Later I found out from her mother that the girl's name is Fikile, but her mother calls her "Pretty," which I think is more than appropriate.

As we were leaving, I went back over to her and waved good-bye, unexpectedly prompting this sweet smile. It was worth the wait. We encounter dozens of young children like Fikile every day. As I've written before, the kids on the homesteads both make my day and break my heart at the same time.

We leave tomorrow for a week in Cape Town. We are taking the opportunity of Karen's visit to explore a bit more of South Africa, and we're very much looking forward to spending some time in a big city for the first time since leaving New York City four months ago today. It's hard to believe that one-third of our stay here is already over.

Kruger

Just so you don't worry that it's all work and no play for us here, here are some photos of the four-day trip we took last weekend to Kruger National Park in South Africa, which is only about three hours from where we live. It was a great trip -- magnificent game viewing and some much-needed down time. Above is Crocodile Bridge Gate -- we had to cross this river to get into the park. (Click any photo to enlarge.)

Above is our car crossing the bridge. Karen is waving out the right-hand window.

Once we were in the park, some elephants put on a show for us.

The three female lions above held up traffic for quite a while. They didn't seem bothered that a long line of cars was right behind them. Luckily we were right in front.

Here's a close-up of one of them.

Kruger is vast and awe-inspiring. We saw lots of big sky like that above.

I actually got up at 4 a.m. on Monday morning to take a guided game walk with Scott and Karen. Above are Scott and I making our way through the bush.

Above are Scott and Karen with our guides Saskia and Albert, surveying the terrain for signs of any big game.

Unfortunately, all we saw that morning were lots of giant spiders like the one above.

Scott and I taking a breakfast break around 8 a.m. I look like I've been up since 4.

On the way home, we saw a giant herd of water buffalo.

After the strenuous morning activities, I spent the afternoon with a good book while Scott and Karen played Scrabble.

This was the view in front of me as I read -- the Letaba River which winds its way past camp and where elephants and other animals come down to drink in the evening.

All in all, we had a great trip and came home refreshed and rejuvenated.

A Death in the Family

The mother of one of the boys we're sponsoring died yesterday (Monday, March 9th). We knew her for only a few short weeks, but her death has affected both of us strongly. Her name was Busisiwe (Boo-si-see-way), and she was about 36 years old. She leaves behind three children -- 14, 11, and 3 years old -- who are now orphans, as their father died a couple of years ago.

We met Busisiwe through her eleven-year-old son, Thabiso, an exceptionally bright boy who speaks excellent English and has surprisingly good manners, but who also skips school more often than not, preferring to hang out in town acting like a tough guy. I first met Thabiso back in December when I was filling our new car at the only gas station in town. I noticed him circling the car at a distance and flashing a wide grin my way. I smiled back at him, and he came over and said "You have a beautiful car, sir." He then asked for money. I reflexively said no, but then on impulse gave him 5 rand (about 50 cents). I drove off thinking what a charming little con man he was and never expected to see him again.

We were still living at the School for the Deaf at the time, which is on the opposite side of town from the filling station. The very next day Thabiso was at my door, flashing the same wide grin. "I've come to greet you, sir," he said. I asked him how he'd found me, and he pointed to the car -- he'd recognized it as he prowled around town that day. I asked him what he'd bought for himself with the money I'd given him the day before, expecting him to say he'd bought some candy or a soft drink, but he replied, "I bought some bread for my mother." Con or not, he had me right there.

From then on Thabiso came to greet me regularly. I'd give him cookies and milk or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and he never asked me for any more money. One day he brought his friend Senzo with him and announced that they were going to wash our car. I got them some soapy water, and then Scott and I watched them go to town on our car. They didn't do a great job -- Scott and I had to rewash the car later to get rid of all the soap streaks -- but I gave each of them 10 rand anyway. I have never seen kids' eyes light up the way theirs did when I handed them each a 10 rand note. They ran off whooping.

Scott and I moved to Mabuda Farm shortly thereafter, and it took Thabiso a while to find our new home. But within a couple of weeks he'd resumed his regular visits, often bringing along his sidekick Senzo. Scott and I soon came to realize that they have a pretty bad (and well-earned) reputation in town as truants and trouble-makers, but they've never caused us any problems -- they just come by to get fed occasionally. We regularly urge them to go to school, and sometimes they do.


Thabiso on left, Senzo on right.

About four weeks ago, Thabiso told us that his mother was very sick. We hadn't met his mother or seen where he lives, so we asked him to take us to his homestead, which is in one of the desperately poor communities Scott visits with the Home-Based Care team. Thabiso's homestead ranks among the poorest we've seen -- just a one-room hut with no running water or electricity, and no food in evidence. Thabiso's three-year-old brother, Machaha, was playing happily in the dirt outside, naked except for a smile as big as Thabiso's.

Thabiso's mother, Busisiwe, was indeed very sick. Though she spoke English very well, she was very quiet with us. She seemed confused and distant and had a wracking cough. Scott arranged for her to come into the hospital to meet with a doctor the next day. From then on, things moved very quickly. Like so many thousands of others here, she was already far gone with HIV-related opportunistic infections. The process of getting on anti-retroviral medication is an arduous one here, but Scott worked hard to expedite the process for her. We began supplying her and her children with food, in order to build up her ability to tolerate the strong drugs. At first we had high hopes that the medication might help her, but as each successive test or examination came back, it became clear how very sick she was.

In the end, Busisiwe never had a chance to begin the medication. Last Wednesday, she was admitted to the hospital with swelling around her heart and severely congested lungs. She remained in the hospital over the weekend, where she was visited by her two young sons. The infections were too far gone, however, and she died on Monday afternoon.

Scott called me from the hospital that afternoon to give me the news. He asked me if I'd seen Thabiso. I hadn't, but as I was driving with our visiting friend Karen to the hospital, I spotted Thabiso and Senzo playing in the churchyard below the hospital. Both were dusty and dirty and covered in grass; it was clear that neither had been to school that day. I honked and pulled over, but Thabiso, perhaps thinking I was going to berate him for not going to school, took off running. In the back of my mind, I also wondered if he didn't also sense that I had bad news about his mother. I jumped out of the car and chased him briefly, but he had a good head start on me and vanished down into the valley below.

I called Scott and told him I'd sighted Thabiso, and it turned out that Scott was with Thabiso's uncle, who lives on the same homestead, and who had come to the hospital to check on his sister, Busisiwe, not knowing that she had already died. Scott said he'd bring Thabiso's uncle down to the church and that we'd look for him together. When they arrived at the church, Thabiso's uncle thought it best to drive back to their homestead to wait for Thabiso there. The five of us, including Thabiso's friend Senzo, who'd materialized just as we were getting into the car, started down the muddy, rutted, dirt road that leads to their homestead. Thabiso's uncle soon saw Thabiso in the distance and jumped out of the car, running after him. Miraculously, he caught him and brought him back to our car idling by the side of the road.

Scott, Karen, and I got out of the car with Senzo. I could tell from the confused, mistrustful look on Thabiso's face that his uncle hadn't told him what had happened, and that he probably still thought he was in trouble for skipping school. As we approached him, I suddenly wondered how we were going to handle this delicate situation. Scott was already very emotional from the shock of Busisiwe's quick death and having to break the news to her brother. Thabiso's uncle, having caught the boy, was pacing distraught by the side of the road, lost in his own thoughts. It suddenly became clear to me that I was going to have to tell the eleven-year-old boy standing in the road in front of me that his mother had just died.

I successfully fought off the tears I felt welling in my own eyes, and took Thabiso gently by both shoulders. I simply said "Thabiso... you know that your mother has been very sick. You did all that you could to help her, but she was just too sick. She didn't make it, and she died this afternoon." He looked around at his uncle, then at the rest of us, taking a minute to comprehend the news, and then he burst into tears. I pulled him to me, his head only reaching my stomach, and held him close while he sobbed into my shirt. The bunch of us stood there for several long minutes which will live in my mind always -- Thabiso's uncle pacing off his grief; Scott comforting Thabiso's teary friend Senzo; Karen standing silently by, and Thabiso clinging to me crying: a strange tableau, the group of us standing there at the side of the dirt road, next to our car with its doors flung open, curious people on their way home from work and school passing by, wondering what was going on....

As I stood there comforting Thabiso, just letting him cry, I looked out over his head and across the beautiful valley before us bathed in late afternoon light, and I thought of the countless similar deaths that had taken place in homesteads right before me and all over Swaziland. The scope of the problem seems so daunting and insurmountable that we often wonder if anything can be done to stem it, and if our presence here makes any difference at all. But as I stood there, the thought came to me that perhaps this is what brought me here; perhaps I was meant to be here for just this moment, for just this one person, to hold this young boy who came into my life at a gas station three months ago, and to stroke his head upon the death of his mother.

Family Drama & Highway Robbery

A busy couple of weeks. We've become progressively more involved with helping two families, and, as with all families, drama abounds. We're dealing with a couple of kids who don't want to go to school and prefer to play hooky all day, a couple of sick kids, a sick and probably dying mother of one child, and none of them have enough to eat, so we're trying to keep them all fed as well. Numerous mini-dramas and family scenes, and ferrying to and from hospitals and schools, and even a midnight rescue (really) have played out all week. I know I signed up to help the people of Swaziland when I came over here, I just didn't anticipate that it would get so personal so quickly. I could write several blog entries about all that we've been through in the past week, but I don't have the energy to relive it all so soon, so instead I'll fill you in on our adventure from last weekend....

We've been wanting to visit Mozambique ever since we got here. We live only thirty minutes from the border, and from there it's only an hour and a half to Maputo, the capitol city of Mozambique, situated right on the Indian Ocean. Mozambique is supposed to have some of the world's greatest beaches, so we were eager to spend some time relaxing in the sun after all the week's dramas. On Saturday morning, we picked up another volunteer at the hospital -- Dave, a medical student from Australia -- and the three of us headed to Mozambique.

We'd been warned that the Mozambique police sometimes set up road-blocks and stopped drivers on trumped up charges in order to extort money, but our drive to Maputo was uneventful. I enjoyed the almost immediate change of atmosphere from land-locked, Anglophone Swaziland, to the more laid-back, tropical, and Portuguese-influenced feel of Mozambique. When we got to Maputo, it was exactly what I expected a recently war-torn, formerly communist, formerly Portuguese colonial city of three million to be: run-down, chaotic, slightly scary, and strangely intruiging. We found the "good" part of town recommended in our guide book and stopped for a great lunch of fresh prawns and cold caiparinhas. We sat over our al fresco lunch for a long time, enjoying the warm sun and ocean breezes. As we sat there, I thought to myself how much I enjoyed being back in a big city, and how I prefered the easy rhythms of Latin cultures to the more buttoned-down Northern European ethos.

By the time we left the restaurant it was nearly 4 p.m. At lunch we'd decided that since it was getting late in the day, we'd simply look for a small beach resort to spend the night and enjoy a full day at the beach on Sunday. We weren't certain how to get out of town and find the beach areas. We were driving down Mao Tse-Tung Blvd., when we saw a sign for "beaches" pointing in the opposite direction we were headed. Scott was driving and he made a quick U-turn at the next light. I was sitting in the front passenger seat with my head buried in the guide book, so I didn't realize at first that Scott was pulling over to the curb. I looked up to see a policemen armed with a large rifle approaching the car.

At first he seemed fairly professional. He asked for Scott's driver's license and asked him if he knew he'd made an illegal U-turn. Scott said he hadn't seen any signs against making a U-turn, which turned out to be the wrong answer. The policeman asked if we were questioning his knowledge of driving laws in Mozambique and took a more belligerent attitude. He kept Scott's license and waved us down the street to where a small group of his fellow policemen were standing. We pulled over as directed, and the original policeman plus one of his comrades began interrogating us on what we were doing in Maputo. We explained that we are volunteers working in Swaziland, but that didn't seem to impress them at all. They kept saying that we'd done "a bad thing" and that we'd have to pay a steep fine for it.

We all knew what was going on, and I knew we'd have to end up paying our way out of the situation sooner or later. Scott, however, has a perhaps more finely tuned sense of justice and injustice than I do, and he continued to insist that there was no sign forbidding U-turns. I kept trying to whisper to him under my breath to just apologize for the "bad thing" we'd done and to get to the financial bargaining so that we could get out of the situation as soon as possible. But the back and forth between Scott and the cops continued for several minutes.

We'd read in the guide book, and heard from others, that if we ever encountered such a situation we should demand to go to the police station, where we were more likely to get a fair hearing than from cops on the take on the street. When the policemen continued to insist that we pay a fine, we finally asked to be taken to the police station. What we hadn't expected, however, was that they'd agree so readily. They opened the back door and two of them got in, both with their large rifles.

The presence of two armed men in the back seat certainly changed the dynamic for me. I immediately began envisioning all the ways the situation could go wrong -- a Mozambique prison was the good option, our bodies by the side of the road was somewhere down the line of thoughts that flashed through my head. The cops directed us back the way we'd come, and did point out a sign forbidding U-turns a couple of blocks before the intersection where we'd turned. They directed us a few more blocks down the main boulevard and then told Scott to turn down a small side street. Scott made the turn, but stopped short when we saw the small, rutted street and suspicious looking area we were headed into. It didn't look as if we were headed to a police station.

I have to give Scott credit for taking a stand at this point. I certainly didn't want to head down that street. When they told him to keep going, he said "No, I don't feel comfortable going down this street." They kept angrily insisting that we had to go to the police station as requested, and Scott kept refusing to move. They started shifting around and telling us we had "to pay" for what we'd done. At this point, I thought it's time to bargain. Luckily I've kept about $100 U.S. in my wallet ever since we arrived in Africa. I figured it would come in handy sometime -- and this seemed like the time. I pulled out $30 and asked if this would help pay for what we'd done. At first, they refused it, and said it was too little -- the "fine" would be much more. I put the money back in my wallet, and told them it was all I had on me. Scott continued not to budge, and the policemen continued to hassle us for a while, but they seemed to be running out of steam. Finally one of them said, that if we'd just drive them around the block, they'd "show us" the police station, but we wouldn't have to go in and they'd accept the $30 as payment for what they'd done.

Scott reluctantly drove forward, and the cops kept their word; they pointed out some official looking building and told us that if we ever "got in trouble" again that was where we should go for help -- as if they were now offering assistance! We turned back onto Mao Tse-Tung Blvd. and pulled over, and they got out. I handed them the $30 and they wished us a good journey. We drove on -- slowly -- and exhausted. The entire ordeal had taken about half an hour. We made a half-hearted effort to put it behind us and to find a near-by beach, but the experience had soured us on Mozambique for the time-being, and I was very happy to arrive home to safe, secure little Swaziland. We'll go back sometime in search of those perfect Mozambique beaches, but we'll definitely skip Maputo.

This coming weekend, we're off to another "fun-filled" city we've been warned about, Johannesburg, to pick up our friend Karen, who will be visiting for the next few weeks. Wish us luck....