The last few days have been a lot slower pace. Jayme and Heather left back for South Africa. Jayme and her husband Lynn were our contacts to get here and Heather works for Global and is up here on a 6 month leave doing some video work for Hands at Work. We drove in off the mountain and into the nearest town called Manzini. We ate in a restaurant and all agreed that Nomsa and her grandchildren cook way better. We didn’t spend long in Manzini I think we were all frustrated when we all of sudden could walk through malls and advertising coming from where we were staying. So we grabbed some groceries and headed back.

Nomsa and her grandchildren have been cooking masterpiece meals for us three times a day. It has made me realize how bad I am of a host. Not only are they taking care of all the food for all the volunteers when they are at work, the children at the camp they are running they are also bringing us these meals every day. They are brilliant cooks and there is always something new to try; especially because almost all the ingredients are grown or raised right here where we live. We eat the chicken and cows that wander around our room, eat their eggs, eat the fruit and vegetables growing all around us and the only things they buy are small necessities for their meals like rice and bread. On Saturday night we made them the only dish I am proud to make, a massive batch of spaghetti sauce complete with three different kinds of meat. It was a small repayment of everything they have been doing for us here.

Samuel is Nomsa’s husband and I think he is the cutest old man around. The first day we asked him what he did and he replied saying he “just loafed all day.” Loafing is now a new term in my vocabulary. He is full of questions like how did the Australians get on that island, to wondering things about Canadian culture to wondering how in the world you spin spaghetti onto your fork using a spoon (he looked like me with chop sticks.) They really are a beautiful family here.

Sunday morning was church. They start late, like we do. Yet it was a surreal experience. We all went to church with Lindiwe and were driving down the road and she told us to take a turn, so we did and then she told us we were here. The church consisted of about 20 tree trunks that made the frame of a small 15×20 foot shack. That was it. There was about 15 adults and 35 kids all huddled under pieces of wood with no roof and no walls. They were all singing, all facing a direction but no one was at the front. When we showed up since we were guests they gave us the cinderblocks to sit on. So picture 55 people crowded under some sticks singing their hearts out. Then all of sudden Lindiwe got up to speak, and then thanks to her, she called us up to speak. So I threw a quick thing together and stumbled through it. I get all on the spot prayers/sharing from the Bible situations, seems that is my major contribution to the trip.

I totally forgot the memory card in my camera for Sunday morning, so we tried to get some pictures on Charity’s disposable camera, and I’ll go back and take pictures of just the sticks. It was a moving morning to see a church function the way they did. A church the size of theStory, about 20 dollars or so in the offering, no building and yet still extremely passionate for God.

For the rest of the day we all loafed. Charity and Shane went for a walk and I laid in my bed and didn’t move.

One of the major things that threw me when I got here, to Africa, was not even being remotely prepared for the awkward situations I would be in. I’m a fan of awkward usually. The Office is one of my favourite shows and I thrive on making people’s faces go red. This kind of awkward is different though.

Home Based Care is awkward. Imagine walking into a home, where everyone is usually scrambling to get you some sort of mat to sit on. The home’s floor is usually created out of hardened cow manure, the walls out of rocks and sticks and the roof out of grass. The home is no bigger than 10×15 feet and you are sitting on the floor. The baby chickens are pecking at your feet, the flies are everywhere. There is a deep odour, one that you know they don’t smell anymore but it is just so strong you can’t ignore it. You arrived either by yourself along with three or four other volunteers, all who barely speak English or you are there with three of your friends and one lady who will translate.

The home is dark, so you have trouble seeing who you are talking to. There is an older lady speaking in a language and you can’t make out a word, and then someone who is deathly ill lying either on the ground or a makeshift mattress. They probably have AIDS, or TB, or a few of a hundred other diseases that people get here. The same kind of diseases we don’t know about because we cured it. The one lady explains what is wrong, and how sick this person is and you only know that because someone is translating here and there when they feel like it. Then comes the silence. Not sure what is ever happening but we all just sit there, and you feel like people are waiting for you to say something. After all, you are the tourist, the one just visiting from another country, a white, rich country at that. The volunteer you arrived with looks at you and says “you can say something now.”

What do you say? Jesus loves you? I hope you feel better? I’m praying for you? Words don’t work here it feels like. They barely understand your words anyway. Yet there you are, with all eyes on you and they want you to say something.

I found myself in this situation almost every day that I’ve been here. Some people that were sick were sitting up and engaging in eye contact while others haven’t looked someone in the eyes for over 5 years. Four year old granddaughters taking care of their grandmas with no one else around. Grandma’s taking care of orphaned children because the entire generation between 25 and 50 have mostly died. Most were getting sicker because they couldn’t afford medicine, never mind the bus to take them into town to buy the medicine.

I have nothing to say. I feel sick to my stomach that I live in a world where we allow people to suffer like this. I feel even sicker that I’m being served by these people and sitting in their huts while they suffer. I have nothing to give. So I fumble out a few useless words, something about grace and being thankful that they’ve kept a good spirit thus far. I’m not even sure anymore and I’m sure they don’t remember.

Something happens always though towards the end. I say a prayer and people start humming and hawing like they did back home to my prayer. Then they look up at me and are so thankful. They are thankful that I came from my country just to visit them, they are thankful that I would pray for them and that I believe in them. A few of them gave us gifts when we left because they were so thankful. They were giving us something, after all of that. I graciously accept their gifts and fifteen minutes after I stepped foot in their home I am leaving wondering how my presence could bring them so much happiness. I leave feeling more broken then when I arrived, yet with a glimmer of hope knowing that they have something that I don’t have. The awkwardness stays with me for each visit and some are rougher than others.

These however, are the people that I am called to be with. These people are the ones that Christ came to free and deliver. These are the people that Jesus wants to comfort and bring love to and bring purpose to. These are the most vulnerable and broken and poor people in the entire world. I have learned that it is in this awkwardness that I am learning what that exactly means. I have started to see why Jesus spent so much time with these people when he was on earth. How far I have come from where I’m supposed to be when I can’t even look someone that’s poor in the eye. How far I am from the heart of Jesus when normal people are my preference because it’s easy and comfortable.
If I can’t be around people that make me feel awkward than I can’t be around those that I’m called to be around. So whatever it is that makes us feel awkward whether it be compassion, sadness, curiosity, difference, language, hygiene or personality let us learn to embrace it because most likely underneath it all is exactly where we are called to be.

On Wednesday we went to a garden that is being started up by Nomsa and her volunteers. The garden is probably 75 meters by 50 meters and we helped put a fence around it. They were waiting for a pipe to be put in so they could get water from the top of the mountain. The garden wasn’t nearly as cool as all the grandma’s (they call them GoGo’s here) and how they worked with us.

Nomsa went to a conference in South Africa (where we stayed when we were there) and felt like she needed to start taking care of people here in Swaziland where she is from. She couldn’t stomach that there was people who didn’t have any food to eat or maybe not any parents to take care of them. So she came back to Swaziland feeling like God was to have her start to take care of the weak and vulnerable in her area. She sent out a call for volunteers to help her and she now has thirty volunteers working with her to take care of people around these mountains. The crazy part is that most of these volunteers are at the age when we put them into nursing homes. They were all women. I am now convinced that the future of the world lies on black women’s shoulders.

These were a group of fiery women, all probably the age of my grandparents. The most fascinating moments were watching them work. The oldest lady there with a cane was the first one up to grab the heavy logs for the fence posts. She put it on her head and led us all in amazement. One of them brought a plastic bag full of water that they all shared. Some of them were swinging pix axes to soften the ground. It was an amazing beautiful site.

It is these same women that work along side of Nomsa all over these mountains . They all feel called by God to take care of the orphans and those that need care. So they split up taking care of over 800 orphans and tons of other people that are sick and dying. They go visit with them and remind them that they are loved. If they can bring medicine, they do. These women are the most inspiring people I have ever come in contact with. They are driven by their passion for the hurting and their passion to serve God. The amount of people that would die alone, and children that would head their households alone would be too much to handle without them here.

Thursday and today we went along with some of these volunteers to visit some of the people that they were responsible. We went to one house where the man being taken care of has not wanted people to look at him for the past 4 years. His mother has been taken care of him but his daughters have abandoned him. He has been lying in his bed for years with no hope of recovery, shaking and dying. Another family we visited was headed by children for the last four years, ever since the eldest who was 12. There are 5 children, and they take care of each other and try to manage.

There was a number of houses that we visited, and I’ve never felt so hopeless. We sit there always in a big circle crammed into a small hut. The floor is usually made out of dried manure and the walls out of sticks and stones and mud and the roof out of grass. We don’t understand much of what they are saying unless Nomsa or Lindiwe (one of Nomsa’s daughters) translates for us. I usually say a prayer for them, trying to form sentences using words that couldn’t even begin to explain my feelings. Then we sit. They are usually speechless that guests from another country are there with them and we are speechless because we can’t believe how much we cared what colour of shirt we were going to where that morning.

One family gave us a massive bag of bananas for saying a prayer. Another family filled up our water bottle. They all lay out mats so we can sit on the floor with them. Their hospitality reminds me of how much I have to offer, and how much I hold on to what I have. They give whatever they can, even when they don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow. It’s hard to write about these experiences because there isn’t much to say. It feels sort of like I’m a tourist visiting poor homes, so it holds me back a bit and makes me feel uncomfortable, because the last thing I want to do is give off the impression that I’m just there to observe out of interest. Yet they are usually thrilled we are there and mention they want us to stay longer or come again. So I keep going, despite the awkward silence that ensues each visit, hopefully just to remind them again, one more day that we love them, they are valued and we honour their humanity with our presence. In these communities people that are sick can be seen as contagious and people try to keep their distance from them because there is such a strong stigma to the sick and dying.

Shane and I went to a soccer game down the road last night also. They are all very good. Sat with a few of the younger kids while we watched the game. It was great. Today we did more home based care and Shane and I are filling in a hole that some of the kids dug to catch rain water, but they hit a rock so it won’t work. Then I will sleep. Then it will be tomorrow and we will see what that brings.

The internet here moves at a lightning fast 30 bytes a second, so I e-mailed this to Ron for him to post for me, we head back to South Africa tomorrow, so hopefully I’ll be able to get some more posts up, possibly some pictures but I don’t know, but I have lots of great pics so far I think.

On Sunday we went to a church in White River, it was a church plant of sorts whose vision was to never have a pastor. It was abnormally (to what I am used to) populated with older folk (all white) but it was cool to see a church plant in South Africa. After church we drove to Swaziland which is about a 3 hour drive to the border and then another 2 hours to get to where we were going. I remember I used to tell everyone that we were going to be working in the mountains of Swaziland and I just thought there were mountains in Swaziland and we were working there. I never actually imagined that we would be up in mountains. But we are and I’ve never really seen anything quite like
it.

Houses are much more spread out here and they are everywhere. People live in almost like little villages with their family. Older sons (at least some that I met) build little homes out of mud and sticks beside their parent’s homes and they live there. It is one of the most beautiful sites to drive through these mountains. Picture the Rockies, but a bit smaller with houses, livestock, farms, roads, markets and people everywhere. Very very few people have cars and if they need to go down the mountain for anything they can catch the one bus that comes in the morning and catch it home at night. The way of life here is completely different.

We are staying at a lady named Nomsa’s house. There are chickens everywhere and it is this family’s livelihood (the family has cattle too—the chickens are Nomsas way of earning money and the cows are
Samuels). We get a friendly reminder of that every morning around 4am when the rooster crows. The grandkids are the labourers of this place. They have done all the amazing cooking for us, skin chickens, garden, fetch water and basically anything that the grandparents (Nomsa and Samuel) tell them to do. Like the one girl we are staying with says, these children (ages 5-15) are like a well oiled machine, they never stopped all day long and we have been treated like royalty while being here. Family sticks together here, children don’t grow older and leave and are left to fend for themselves and the elderly run the houses and everyone else works under them.

We have spent the last two days working with the young orphan girls from the community at the Chief’s Royal Residence, which is basically used as a community centre, which is basically a big plot of land with a few open huts on it. There are about 28 girls in all and there ages
were from 12-25 and six of them had babies. When we first met them we walked into a big open room and they were all in chairs facing the front in one of the corners singing a song, with no one in the front to lead them. They sing often here and it is never front lead. Someone in the group leads the song by singing the words or the beat a few bars ahead and then everyone follows them. Every time they break out in song it is beautiful and the few times the song is in English or there are actions we try to go along with it.

It is the week of the Reed Dance so the kids that would be normally be in school aren’t. So there is organized lectures everyday for these 28 girls. The first one was a three hour lecture on how to start a business; it was like first year economics in three hours, so much information in so little time. The second day was teaching the girls about abuse and about their bodies (Shane and I took a walk to play sports with the kids). The girls learned songs about staying a meter away from their private parts, it was pretty funny. I got to do a little sharing with the girls and talked about loving your neighbour and what that meant. The highlight of my day came when every body usually went home but we all stayed at the place with the kids to hang out. Shane played soccer, the girls played games and learned new songs, and I sat with 5-6 guys my age and got to talk with them. We sat there for three hours and talked about everything, school, work, money, life, marriage, friends, opportunity, games…and it was in these conversations that I started to realize how much the
Western world really has affected negatively their world. (I’ve been try to save some of my posts that are thoughts on the laptop also, so I’ll hopefully be able to write a bit about this soon).

I went down one of the hills to see one of the guy’s house. He was 21 and lived in his own hut built out of mud, sticks, rocks and grass. Families live together here. When a child is old enough they build a new hut on the property and they move into it. They have chickens also, a big Avocado tree and goats to keep them alive. He was happier than anything else and he had no idea that he was missing out on air conditioning, big mortgages and dishwashers. Or maybe he did, and he just didn’t care. Can’t blame him.

The other guy we met is trying desperately to get into school. He hasn’t had much luck. The university here are government funded but he hasn’t got accepted and the colleges are just too much money. He spent a lot of money once to take a computer class to help him get his skills up and they guy took off with the money not to teach them a thing. He is spending another year to try to get into school, which he probably won’t, then he said he was going to give up and figure out another way to live. He was 23.

The way of life here is beautiful. We have been eating the chickens that have been running around every day, eating the fruit and vegetables that is growing all around us, and living life and taking
care of people that are in need. I’ll tell you more about Nomsa’s story tomorrow, it is my favourite story and deserves more space. Tomorrow we are of to a community garden that Nomsa and her volunteers are starting to help build a fence around it so the animals don’t get in and eat all their plants.

The last two days we spent at Kruger park scoping out animals in their natural environment. We saw elephants that were going to attack us. A leopard. Giraffes. Monkeys and Baboons. Water Buffalo. Hippo. Tons of Impala. Crocodiles and a slew of other animals. It was brilliant and majestic. It is one of the best game parks in the world. I thought the lion African safari was cool until I realized that we are just driving around in their home, nothing between us and them. They aren’t sedated and they eat each other for dinner. People we are staying with got to watch lions attack giraffes and a hippo. This is the real thing and we are just observers. It was beautiful. Unfortunately I never got to see anything attack something else, which is really what I wanted.

We head out tomorrow for Swaziland and I won’t have Internet for two weeks (I haven’t had it for the last few days either). I will have electricity so I will be typing and keeping track of my time, I just won’t be able to post it until I get back. Which I will do.

You know when you are watching TV and you get this idea of what Africa is like. Houses made out of garbage, dirt roads, people walking/sitting around everywhere. Today was a day like that. It blew my mind. I went with a nurse named Tulee to do some home based care visits today, and everything was just too much to take in. I was able to find the area on google maps. If you click here it should take you to a bird’s eye view of the area that we were doing home based care in. Looking from the top doesn’t really do justice, but it gives you a small idea. the R538 is the road that we drive through to get to all the homes that we visit and then usually walk through the dirt roads, they are barely car worthy.

We first drove through foot paths with two foot deep pot holes randomly throughout to pick up a women and her extremely young granddaughter to bring them back to the clinic. They locked their door made out of thrown together tin/wood and worked our way back up to the road through the broken glass (she was in bare feet). We dropped her off and then let the other groups take the one vehicle they had to do their stops while we walked around the Jerusalem area. It felt surreal. Chickens, goats, cows walking around. Houses with slabs of tin thrown on for roofs with cinder blocks and rocks to hold them down. The only car on the road was a vehicle from another aid group.

We walked into the first home, and they had couches, so we sat with her and the other 3 ladies I was with chatted in Swati to the patient. I prayed for her and we left to go to the next. The next patient is where my heart broke. It was a girl probably around thirteen, who could knit to put any white elderly to shame and she had TB. The place we walked into felt like my unfinished, moldy, chipping away basement but the cement on the floor was cracked in half, we sat on broken wooden benches and the floor and it would be maybe the size of one room in my . The mother had epilepsy and the aunt had TB also. We were trying to help her get medicine for free from a free clinic, but lots of complications were arising out of that.

There was another lady I went to do visits with. Her name was Gogo Anna (Gogo is grandma). In one human the entire view of the elderly in the West completely crumbled before my eyes. I saw this elderly lady yelling hello to groups of people, leading us in song, chatting it up with children and adults and basically become a caregiver to everyone she ran into. Her entire life and everything she did was wrapped up into helping the people around her and it seemed like she was a legend in the area. Everyone we ran into she knew and was talking to. It was beautiful. Typically we throw our elderly into a home because they are nothing more than a drain on us and a drain on society. In Africa, it seems like what is going well is because of the blood and sweat of the elderly women.

It just amazed me to see so many children and elderly play a crucial role in the making of a household. I watched/helped a young girl push 30 gallons of water up a hill to her home. Twelve year old girls where I’m from are too busy trying to be like Paris Hilton to worry about the wellbeing of their family. Grandmothers are just as much motherly figures as mothers are, but where I’m from they are seen as a nuisance and their parenting styles get in the way.

There is just something different here in the air. It’s not that I feel sorry for them or think man I can’t believe that they have to live like this, because honestly, I don’t think they feel like that. Not just because they don’t know any better but because it’s not what wakes them up in the morning. Their values are different (not necessarily better) and there is just so much about them that makes me rethink my entire way of living. Everything about it. To how I travel, treat people, value people, eat, purchase, learn. Our way isn’t the only way, and it certainly isn’t the right way. So it’s a breath of fresh air to see something so different.

Today was a shaker, that is for sure. From what we have heard, Swaziland is supposed to be out of this world compared to this. So we look forward to Sunday for that. I wasn’t able to take any pictures today, so unfortunately, I’ve got none, so I hope my words have done some justice. Tomorrow and Saturday we spend at Kruger National Park so I hope to get some amazing pictures there including some cat of a sort attack and kill some weaker animal, cause that would be amazing.