July Update

I'm sorry it's been so long since I've posted. Sometimes it's a bit difficult to see and experience all that we do, especially some of the more sad and painful situations, and then to relive it by writing about it. Often I just want to forget it all with a good book, a cocktail, or by watching a movie on my laptop. But I've heard from enough of you that you enjoy and/or get something out of reading my entries that I promise to try and write more often. Following is an update on some of the people and situations I've written about previously, along with one or two new ones:

THABISO

Thabiso is the hardest to write about, so I'll start with him. After his mother's death, he went to live with an aunt, Make Sacolo. His aunt seemed genuinely to care for Thabiso, and with eight other kids of various ages in the family, it seemed that he would have companionship and a good support structure at her home. We had high hopes that he'd fit in with his new family. Unfortunately, things were rocky all along, mainly because Thabiso is used to running wild and doing his own thing. On the bright side, he has been going to school almost every day for a few months now. He seems to realize the importance of that minimum amount of structure in his life. On the down side, he simply didn't like living with his aunt, and he often ran away when required to do simple chores like fetching fire wood or tending the family's goats. A couple of weeks ago, he left for good and simply refused to go back to his aunt's house at all. He returned to the empty hut where he had lived with his mother, and is now living there alone. An older male cousin and his girlfriend live in a separate hut on the same compound, but they provide little real supervision or support for Thabiso. Essentially he is now an eleven-year-old boy living on his own. Sadly, this is not uncommon here. I feel very sad about his situation, but I have begun to distance myself from much further involvement with him, as I am not sure we will be able to do much more for him in the four months we have left in Swaziland. (You can read more about Thabiso here and here.)

ORPHAN FAMILY

I first reported on this family of seven children living on their own in this post. Unfortunately, since then, not much has changed. The social worker who had promised to help us, has turned out to be even more severely mentally disturbed than I first thought, and she now refuses to see me when I go to see her to check on their status. On the bright side, it appears that an adult female relative from another town has moved in with them and is now providing some supervision. Our ultimate goal remains to get them moved to Bulembu, the old mining town that is now a well-run "city of children," where hundreds of orphans just like them are receiving caring supervision, a secure roof over their heads, regular meals, and good schooling.

KHULILE: "FOUR LOLLIPOPS WOMAN"

I wrote about our wrenching experience with Khulile here. Since then, Scott and I have been regularly providing her with food for herself and her family. Khulile has gained weight and seems to be doing much better than when we first met her. It is amazing how just a little food makes such a big difference especially for people on HIV medication. Scott and I spend less than $50 a month to provide her with basic food supplies, but this has helped her to tolerate the drugs much better, giving her a whole new lease on life. Unfortunately, on a visit to her just over a month ago, her young six-year-old son, Ndu, who had been looking sickly, tested positive for HIV. Since then we have been trying to work through the truly Orwellian system of trying to get him initiated on anti-retroviral drugs, but even with our help it is taking a long time. It is amazing that anyone gets started on the drugs given the bureaucratic obstacles and incompetence we have encountered at every turn.

ELSIE'S NEW HOUSE

I think it's time for something more uplifting. I haven't written about Elsie and her family before. They are Home-Based Care patients who Scott visits each month, and whom we have come to know and like. Elsie is a strong, intelligent, independent, and very likeable woman in her 40's. She lives with her six-year-old daughter Siphesihle and her 18-month old son Thembenkhosi on a very poor, rocky homestead. Two of her adult sisters live in separate huts on the same homestead. As they will be the first to tell you, they are a family of sick women: everyone on the homestead is HIV-positive. But Elsie is doing well on ARV's and is seemingly strong as an ox. She wants to work to support her family, but there are no jobs. Her daughter Siphesihle is an adorable girl and one of Scott's special favorites; we call her his "girlfriend."

Elsie has long needed a new house. The mud hut she lives in is literally falling down, and the thatched roof is disintegrating such that it provides no shelter from rain or wind. On her own, Elsie had begun work on a new hut made of sticks, stones and mud, but she had stopped half-way through because she had no money to buy nails to continue building the frame. When Scott's good friend John visited us a few weeks ago, he generously volunteered to pay for completing the structure Elsie had begun. That new hut is nearly complete, but as Elsie was finishing it, it became apparent that it would only be a stop-gap building; what was really needed was a more permanent structure to house her ailing family. Scott and I decided that we would help her build a one-room brick house with a tin roof. My parents are now visiting us, and when we took them to visit Elsie, they fell for her infectious good humor and hardy work ethic. They are now generously funding the entire project, which is also now well underway. For about $1,500 Elsie and her children will now have a well-built, warm, and dry new home to shelter them for years to come. Again, it is amazing how just a little money goes so far in helping such a needy and deserving family.

MOM & DAD VISIT

I'll end this post on a happy personal note: my parents are visiting us right now. They arrived in early July and will be here until the end of the month. This is their first return to Africa since they served as lay missionaries in Kenya from 1969 to 1972. They have immediately taken to our life in Swaziland and are as moved and impressed by the struggles of the ordinary Swazi people as we are. They have visited the various families we are engaged in trying to help, have spent a day making Home-Based Care visits with Scott, and, as noted above, are helping build a new house for a particularly deserving family. We just got back from a few days in Kruger National Park, where we had an extraordinary number of great encounters with the big game there. All in all, it is being a very meaningful experience to witness them reconnect to this continent which played such a big role in their lives many years ago.

All the News That's Fit to Print

Sorry I haven't posted anything on here in a while. I've been busy catching up on the news... or what passes for news in the Swazi press. Following are some of my favorite recent headlines (and, yes, they're all real). More of my own news to follow soon.

Social Work in Swaziliand: "Do you believe in demons?"

For a few months now we've been very concerned about a family of seven orphan children living on their own, without any apparent adult oversight. The oldest child in the family is a girl of fifteen, and the youngest is around three years old. Scott first visited them with the Home-Based Care Team about three months ago. He came home shell-shocked by what he'd seen: seven kids fending for themselves, living in squalor, with no food. The team had examined the children and left them some food, but, unfortunately, such families of orphans are not uncommon here, and the team had felt there was little else to be done for them other than to keep an eye on them each month. After Scott told me about the dire situation of these children, we both felt that we had to do something. Unfortunately, as is all too common here due to the extreme need we encounter at every turn, every day, we did nothing at the time.

Two of the children in front of their house.

After the Home-Based Care Team visited the children again about a month ago, we made a renewed commitment to help these kids. We had heard of a place called Bulembu, an abandoned mining town which is being converted into a non-traditional orphanage -- a sort of "city of children," in which small groups of eight children live together in refurbished homes under the care of a Mage (pronounced MA-gay, and meaning "mother"), who runs the house, provides emotional support, and teaches life skills to the children. Siblings are kept together in the same home. In addition, Bulembu has an excellent primary school, which students attend free of charge. The whole operation is supported by a consortium of Christian groups, and there is no charge whatsoever for children to live there. (You can read about our recent visit to Bulembu on Scott's blog.)

As good as Bulembu is, there are some obstacles to getting children accepted there. Approval is needed from a government social worker to take children from their families. Though this would seem to be relatively straightforward, since these children have no parents and no one at all looking out for them, it's not quite that simple. Due to the way the extended family structure works in Swaziland, permission is still required from some member of the family, no matter how remote, and they may not always be willing to send the children away. It's a sad fact of life here that some adults benefit from having vulnerable children at their disposal -- perhaps to help them in the fields, but often for more unsettling reasons. For example, when the children receive food donations from Home-Based Care Team, relatives and/or neighbors will often descend on the home to take the food for themselves, leaving only a small portion, if any, for the children. You can also imagine how the children are vulnerable to other serious types of abuse, including sexual molestation and rape.

Two more children on the homestead.

After we visited Bulembu, and found that they had the capacity and were actively seeking to enroll more children, we decided to make a concerted effort to get this family of seven children accepted there. In the process we found out that there is only a single social worker for the entire eastern region of the country, comprising a population of around 250,000 people. Consequently, she is only in her office in Siteki on Mondays and Fridays, spending the rest of her time in other parts of the region. This past Monday (May 11) I went to the social worker's office with Deborah Maphosa, one of the Home-Based Care nurses, to act as translator.

I was immediately impressed by the efficiency of the social worker. She wanted to know all about the children -- where they lived, how many of them, what ages, their family situation, their health status, were they in school or not? Deborah and I filled her in on their situation, and then, without prompting from us, she declared that she knew the perfect place for them: Bulembu. As soon as the words were out of her mouth, however, she announced that she could do nothing further for us that day, since she had another pressing appointment: she had to go and pray over some of her other clients. "I hate to tell you this, doctor (she, like so many others here automatically assumes I'm a doctor), but pills, injections, operations, medicine in general just don't work. It's all about demons, and until you get rid of the demons you will never cure anyone."

As I was processing this pronouncement, she looked me in the eye, and said "You do believe in demons, don't you?"

"Yes, there certainly are lots of demons in this world," I replied, not wanting to risk her help with the orphan family. She then proceeded to tell me that she is a prophet, sent by God to help the poor. Like all prophets, she has been marked by a special sign from God; in her case, she has had nothing whatsoever to drink in four years -- not a single drop of any kind of liquid, including water.

She didn't seem to expect any response to this as she went on that she is "still awaiting a sign from God to begin my own radio show so that sick people can call in and be healed over the phone." I wished her luck with that, and then asked when I might return to take her to see the orphans. She immediately snapped back into business mode and asked me to return the next day. As Deborah and I drove back to the hospital, Deborah said with classic understatement "That woman has two sides to her personality -- but she's wonderful at what she does."

The next day, Tuesday, Deborah and I, along with Scott this time, returned to the social worker's office. She was ready and waiting for us to go. At the orphans' homestead, we found the children preparing their breakfast, a small pot of maize meal. The social worker quickly surveyed the homestead and then began gently interviewing the children, focusing on the oldest girl. I couldn't understand most of what was being said, since they were speaking in SiSwati, but the social worker was taking copious notes, and seemed to put the children at ease. After about 45 minutes, the social worker came out of the small house and said to Deborah, Scott, and I, "These children must go to Bulembu." She then began explaining to the children just what Bulembu was, a place where they would live together in their own home, and receive food, clothing, education, and health care all free of charge. One of the little girls began jumping up and down and clapping, and all of them had big smiles on their faces. Scott said it was the first time he'd ever seen any of them smile.

I had another appointment that day, but Scott spent the rest of the day with the social worker, trying to track down an adult relative of these children to sign off on their referral to Bulembu. In the end, Scott came home and informed me that, amazingly, the children are not orphans at all -- both parents are alive and living in different parts of Swaziland -- they have simply abandoned their children. Despite the horrible implications of such a situation, the good news is that, based on their abandonment, the children are still eligible to live at Bulembu. If all goes well -- that is, if one of the parents who have abandoned these children will sign a piece of paper releasing them to Bulembu -- they will be transferred there by the end of May.

One of the orphan boys.

This entire experience is, to me, indicative of the way things run in Swaziland, for better and for worse. The situations we encounter here daily are often quite stark and dramatic -- a family of seven children living on their own, for instance. But our attempts to help can be stymied by the most mundane bureaucratic procedures -- getting a permission to help such children from an over-worked social worker and a relative who has already abandoned them. On the other hand, Bulembu exists, and will help improve the lives of these children exponentially. Even our interaction with the social worker was generally positive; while I may not share her views on modern medicine, she acted quickly and efficiently to help these children.

Just for the record, I do believe in demons -- we encountered clear evidence of them throughout this experience. The demons I'm referring to may not be the same ones the social worker believes in, but nonetheless she helped these children immensely in beginning to exorcise the demons from their lives.

Young Heroes: One Way You Can Help

Young Heroes is a non-profit organization in Swaziland which provides direct food and clothing aid to over one thousand children orphaned by AIDS in Swaziland. These are children (like these ones) without mothers or fathers, who are now living on the generosity of their relatives, who are themselves most likely severely financially stretched by their own needs. I have been providing some administrative assistance and consulting work to Young Heroes since I've been in Swaziland, and can vouch for the excellent work that they do. 100% of your donation will go directly to supporting these vulnerable children; all administrative & overhead costs are covered by the Swazi government.

Below is a message from the president of the Young Heroes Foundation, U.S.A., outlining a fun way to help this worthwhile organization. Please consider hosting a party as described below. The Young Heroes Foundation in the U.S. was established to channel support to the Swazi organization, and all donations are tax-deductible in the U.S.

* * *
Friends:

Every year, the Day of the African Child is celebrated on June 16th. But all too often, it’s just another day of empty promises for many children.

This year, Young Heroes Foundation would like change that by turning it into a day of action on behalf of the AIDS orphans of Swaziland, the nation with the world’s highest rate of HIV/AIDS.

Our goal: To encourage 100 people to hold house parties on or around that day in order to raise funds for children who have nothing. Already, people from Montclair, New Jersey to Bellingham, Washington have responded to our call. We hope you’ll consider joining them. Doing good doesn’t have to be hard work – it can be fun, too.

The kind of party you hold is up to you. While we ask that each party have a goal of raising $500, any amount you raise will go directly to helping children in need. Young Heroes now supports just over 1,000 children, but we have many more who need our assistance. We guarantee that 100% of donations we receive will go directly to supporting the orphans in our program. (Young Heroes Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation based in Northampton, Massachusetts, USA. All U.S. donations are fully tax-deductible.)

You can find full information about this effort – and about Young Heroes – at http://youngheroes.org.sz/dayofaction.asp. Or check out our video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nrzNdNDsSg.

If you join us, we’ll feature your party on our site and on Facebook at http://apps.facebook.com/causes/41443?m=5ce60ecc&recruiter_id=10757026. And we’ll send you material to help you spread the word.

There’s one more way you can help the cause: Please consider forwarding this email to your friends and colleagues who might be interested. We’re a small organization that has grown person-to-person from the grassroots because we believe in the power of individuals helping one another.

If you have any questions or comments, please send an email to dayofaction@youngheroes.org.sz.

Thank you,

Steve Kallaugher
President
Young Heroes Foundation


Help the orphans of Swaziland -- become a Young Heroes sponsor at http://
youngheroes.org.sz.

Farewell to Summer

It's been cold and rainy here for the past couple of days. Scott and I spent last weekend in Durban, South Africa, where it was warm and sunny, but when we returned it seemed as if the seasons had definitively changed. The seasons here are the opposite of those in the U.S., so we are well into fall here. I didn't expect it to get quite as cool as it has (in the upper 50's F right now), and I miss the warm weather already. We live on a high, windy plateau, and everyone tells us it will get even cooler over the coming months. Before summer becomes too distant a memory, here are some photos from around the farm where we live taken this summer.

Scott on the road leading from town to Mabuda Farm.

More of the 1 km road leading to the farm. You can see some of the farm's vast cornfields to the left.

Walkway leading down to our house on right.

Scott standing in front of our house. Kitchen windows to right, living room/Scott's room in middle, and bedroom/my room (w/chimney) to left.

A view of one of the farm's pastures taken on one of our evening walks. The farm is huge -- about 10,000 acres -- and we still haven't explored all of it.

One of the grass pastures where the farm's dairy cattle graze. The old bathtub is used as a trough.

A view of the main house, where our landlords, Dr. & Mrs. Pons, live. In the foreground is one of the two dairies on the farm. You can also see some of the Pons's horses grazing in the field in front of their house.

Another view of the main house. We live several hundred yards distant in the farm's old "lodge."

Me on one of the dirt roads on the farm.

Scott in one of the pastures they started harvesting for hay back in late January (mid-summer here).

Another evening view of same pasture.

Karen Wong and I at the farm's lily pond, which also serves as a source of drinking water for the farm.

Scott on the way home from an evening walk, gorgeous African sunset in background.

Scott and I walking through some cornfields ready for harvest. Much of the corn is used to make corn meal, so they leave it on the stalks to dry completely before harvesting and grinding.

It feels odd to be heading into winter as everyone at home heads into summer -- another mark of the great physical distance between us. Remember us as we settle into the winter months here!

Where Have All the Swazis Gone?

Here is a link to an excellent newspaper article from the Toronto Globe and Mail documenting the unprecedented population decline in Swaziland caused by HIV/AIDS. The article does a great job of outlining the factors that have led to Swaziland's sad record as the country with the world's highest rate of HIV infection. Though the article is over a year old, nothing has changed, and it does a good job of elucidating the situation we see on the ground here every day.

The author of the article, Stephanie Nolen, has also written a great book called 28 Stories of AIDS in Africa, which tells the stories of 28 AIDS patients from different countries across Africa. The book's introduction provides a fascinating overview the genesis of the AIDS pandemic in Africa (and the world). I highly recommend the book to anyone interested in learning more about how AIDS is affecting the developing world.

Thabiso: An Update

It's tough being a kid in Swaziland.

It's difficult tell how Thabiso, whose mother, Busisiwe, died four weeks ago today, is actually doing. (You can read Busisiwe's story here.) In some ways he seems fine, perhaps even better off than he was when his mother was alive: he has a stable home with his aunt, and he is now attending school regularly. But there have been some bumps along the way, and he definitely faces some big obstacles. He resisted going to his aunt's at first, preferring to remain at his mother's homestead with the young male cousin who took it over. His aunt's homestead is in the same community where he was living with his mother, but significantly further from the main road into town, and thus from town itself, including his school. I don't think he was too worried about being farther from school, but the additional distance certainly cramped his style as budding man-about-town in Siteki.

His aunt's homestead seems like a more stable, well-run home than what we saw of his life with his mother. (This is not a judgment on his mother; the poor woman was trying to hold it together for herself and three kids as she was dying.) One of the good things about the Swazi culture is the strong extended family ties which function to absorb orphaned children like Thabiso. There was no question of him or his siblings going to an orphanage or being left to fend for themselves on the streets. Though both of his parents are dead, Thabiso has two living grandmothers and a network of aunts and uncles on both sides of his family. They came together after his mother's death to decide who would care for the kids. Unfortunately, no one was in a position to take all three of them. Thabiso's older sister was already living with her grandmother, so she will now live with her permanently; Thabiso's younger brother was taken in by an adult male cousin and his girlfriend who as yet have no children of their own; and it was decided that Thabiso would live with one of his father's sisters. Though Thabiso's aunt is by no means wealthy, at least her husband has a steady job with the local electric company, and it appears that they are able to feed and clothe their own several children along with the addition of Thabiso. Other of Thabiso's extended family have pitched in to help with additional support for school fees, school uniforms, new shoes, etc., so that the full financial burden doesn't fall to his aunt alone.

That said, Thabiso still seems lost. In the United States we would expect that of an eleven-year-old who has just lost his mother. But here it seems that children are simply expected to move on as if nothing unusual has happened. Perhaps that is precisely because early encounters with death are not at all unusual here. Just last Friday, Thabiso's entire class was excused from attending school so that they could attend the funeral of one of their classmates who had been "sick since birth," as the official notice put it.

Thabiso's mother was buried the Saturday after she died. The following Monday Thabiso was expected back at school. He didn't go. He put on his uniform and acted as if he was headed to school, but instead he headed into town and hung out there playing with other children either not enrolled or skipping class like himself. He kept up this charade all week. Scott and I caught onto him pretty soon, since Siteki is such a small town it's hard to hide there, and we'd see him ducking out of sight when he saw us in town. On Friday of that week, he and his partner in crime, Senzo, showed up at our house first thing in the morning, with a confused, scarcely understandable tale of being kicked out of their respective homes, being chased by the police all night, being beaten by town thugs -- on and on it went. We've experienced these tall tales from the boys before, and though both Scott and I felt sorry for their predicament, we didn't want to be taken for yet another ride by these eleven-year-old con men in training. So instead of the sympathy and warm breakfast they were probably hoping for, we packed them into our car and took them to school.

As serendipity would have it, just as we arrived at Thabiso's school, the headmaster was exiting his office with Thabiso's aunt. Their jaws fell open when they saw us walk up with Thabiso, since his aunt had gone to the school to file the equivalent of a missing child report -- Thabiso had not been home in days, but, as we soon found out, had been running wild night and day with Senzo. Both of the boys took quite a tongue-lashing from both the headmaster and Thabiso's aunt. (It was probably only Scott's and my presence that prevented them from receiving a physical lashing as well.) Scott and I got embroiled in a de facto parent-teacher conference about what to do about Thabiso. The upshot was that Thabiso was sent home that day in his aunt's care, and told to come to school on Monday only if he wanted to. There would be no more forcing or coercion. Essentially, the school washed their hands of him unless he decided to attend of his own free will. He was given the weekend to think about it. Scott and I told him he could not visit us or expect anything from us until he had proved that he had attended school every day for a week.

For the last two weeks, everything seemed fine. Thabiso went to school religiously every day. After the first week, he showed up at our house to show us his school work. I visited the headmaster the following day, and he confirmed that Thabiso had been attending school every day. Thabiso's teacher even bought him a new pair of sneakers to wear for P.E. By the end of last week (when he showed up to show us the note excusing him from school on Friday to attend his classmate's funeral), Thabiso seemed very proud of attending school every day for two weeks.

Unfortunately, events took an abrupt turn for the worse over this past weekend. I sensed something was wrong on Saturday when Thabiso told us that he was spending the weekend at Senzo's house. (Senzo's is another sad story, which I won't go into now. Suffice it to say that he comes from a desperately sad, chaotic household, where he lives alone with a less-than attentive aunt.) I couldn't imagine Thabiso's aunt letting him stay with Senzo, so soon after trying to establish a stable home environment for him at her homestead. Nonetheless, Thabiso assured us that everything was fine and that his aunt knew and approved of his weekend with Senzo. It turns out she didn't.

Yesterday afternoon (Sunday), as a reward for attending school for two weeks straight, we took Thabiso, along with our two "good" kids, Nosipho and Mancoba, for pizza and a swim at the country club attached to the sugar cane company town of Simunye, which is about half an hour from where we live. The kids had a great time playing in the pool and gorged themselves on pizza and french fries and cokes. It was great fun seeing them frolic in the pool and have such a rare, care-free time. On the way home at dusk, we dropped off Nosipho and Mancoba first, and were on our way to Thabiso's home, when we encountered his pal Senzo crying at the side of the road. Another long, twisted story ensued, about beatings and police and threats of what sounded like a lynching. I have to admit I soon lost interest, and Senzo's tears, which flow frequently, didn't move me. Thabiso, however, jumped out of the car and said he was staying with Senzo. We said no, it would be best if he went home to his aunt's, especially after being away all weekend. But Thabiso was adamant that he wouldn't return home, most likely because he was supposed to have been there all weekend and would now face stiff punishment upon his return. It was getting dark by this point, and I was getting impatient with all the stories and stubbornness on their part. We admonished Thabiso to return home on his own, knowing that he wouldn't, and then left them on their own.

This morning (Monday), on his way in to the hospital, Scott encountered both Thabiso and Senzo hiding up in a tree by the side of the road, where they'd apparently spent the night. They were both exhausted, but Scott delivered Thabiso to school so as not to spoil his attendance record from the past two weeks. We intend to visit Thabiso's aunt this week to get her point of view on what's happening with Thabiso, and to work with her to prevent a recurrence of this weekend's events. Unfortunately, it seems that Senzo, as sad and charming and needy as he is, is not a good influence on Thabiso, and we'll have to address that situation as well.

I write this long description of events to illustrate the myriad problems caused by the overwhelming number of AIDS deaths in this country. Thabiso's is just one story among thousands upon thousands of AIDS orphans who are rapidly becoming a lost generation in Swaziland. Yes, Thabiso is receiving basic support from his aunt and extended family, but is he really receiving from them the same level of love, discipline, and attention that his own parents would give him if they were alive? And what about the psychological trauma of not only losing both parents but being separated from siblings as well? Such questions are rarely addressed here. The extended family network which has traditionally worked so well for Swazis is being taxed to the breaking point by the continual onslaught of AIDS. Such families are already overstretched in trying to provide for their own children, which often already include other orphans they've had to take in. I don't know what the answer is -- it certainly seems like an insurmountable problem as long as AIDS continues to devastate the population here. Long-term, large-scale solutions which can only come from better education, increased economic opportunity, and improved health care are what are needed. In the meantime, we're just trying to help kids like Thabiso who are right in front of us.