Today is Suzie's 21st birthday so last night I had my home stay mom teach my how to sing happy birthday in Xhosa. So in the morning when Suzie got to the center we all broke out singing it to her. We started the morning by having Kenneth come in and talk to us. He works for the Institutes for Justice and Reconciliation and knows a lot about the Truth and Reconciliation Committee. For the most part he just gave us a general review of everything and then he showed us the introduction chapter to a DVD about apartheid and the TRC. He works a lot on community healing and he shows the DVD to community leaders in hopes that he can help them understand better what happened and how to address the issues in his or her community. I was having a hard time being present for the beginning part of his conversation because we get a lot of noise from the kitchen filtering into the room and he had a quite voice. The one thing I did take away from him that I really liked is “If we don’t know how the past came to be, then were not going to recognize it when it comes again.” This is why he goes around and continues to talk about everything that happened during apartheid even though he told us some would rather ignore it and not teach it. The DVD also gets pretty graphic at parts he says and a lot of people are apposed to showing students it, but he thinks they need to see it (everyone does) because then it shows you that real humans did this. If you read it in a book it feels like it happened forever ago and it’s easy to write it off as though the people who did it are nothing like me today so there’s no way I can do it. This kind of brought the thought up in my head that this could be the very reason why in school today back in the US we still watch a good deal of movies on the Holocaust.
After he left we did hospice visits. A lot of people’s blogs aren’t going to be happy about today, especially if they are just copying from their journals like I am. We split our group up into two smaller groups because they took the feedback from us the day before how we didn’t like how our giant group was just going around like tourists at the zoo. The first home we went to we had been told half were going to go in from our car and then come back and the other half would go to ensure that we weren’t overcrowding the homes. The patients we were visiting were living in the shacks so they had little space. I was waiting in the car and after about a minute everyone came back, nurses included and then we left to the next one. I didn’t even get to go look because I guess the patient didn’t need the nurse’s help. The second place we went was so uncomfortable for me. I hate to not really write about it but my mind hasn’t even found a way to write out what I saw and still have the same effect it had on me. The patient was a man who was unable to move from the waste down and was HIV positive. His family didn’t really know how to take care of him so they let him just sit in his waste for up to 48 hours till the nurses came back because they only come every other day. Since he doesn’t move his lower body around he had huge bedsores worse then anything I’ve ever seen. His knee was basically fully exposed with skin no longer remaining. I saw both of his sores and I couldn’t comprehend how nobody had informed the family that even just moving him around every couple of hours would help prevent that from having happened. Apparently the nurses don’t tell the families what to do at all they just come do their job and then leave. They also told Megan who is a nursing student that when they run out of the antibiotic cleaning stuff they use salt water. I’ve been in the ocean with an open cut and it burns. I can’t imagine the pain that this would cause a person. The smell too. Since the family is poor and don’t know where there next meal is coming from they rent out the front part of their shack to others who use it for a shabeen (township bar). Any sick person needs sleep but I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to sleep when right on the other side of your wall is people drinking. The mom had just gotten into town and this was one of the first times she was seeing her son. She didn’t know how serious a condition he was in and she was crying a lot of the time while staring at us and again I felt helpless. I wanted to take him to a hospital or something, but couldn’t. The head woman who came with us said she was going to do everything she could to get him a bed in the hospice the next day because he had progressed so quickly, but even if she does the family still has to find there own way to get him out there. I was holding it in fairly well, but had to go outside for a moment to try and recompose myself. I saw this dog under our van and he started walking towards me where he then curled up next to the open front of the shack. He had a huge cut on his ear that flies were flocking to and I don’t know why but this pushed me over. I hate to see animals hurt like that but the image of that man’s fully exposed knee was in my mind and I could just imagine flies going to it making things worse. At that point I wanted nothing more than to leave, but we had to stay and wait for the nurses to finish cleaning and wrapping up the sores. Before going we gave the family some money and although I’m sure they used it for food, I hope they used it to transport him to the hospice.
I felt really bad because apparently the other group had a far worse experience then we did. I don’t want to talk about it because I wasn’t there, but everyone was really upset when they got back. After lunch we went to Siyaya, which is musical group that travels the world performing. I definitely needed some music in my life and Monalisi dancing and singing helped to brighten my mood back up. Even now typing my journal into my blog it’s really hard for me to hold back tears. If you want to read another great post about Thursday I suggest Aaron’s. I was so thankful that I got to work with the kids in the afterschool program again today though because kids just have a hold of my heart and helping 2nd and 3rd graders with division and measurements helped get my mind back to simpler things. At the end though I was in tears again because they were all saying “goodbye Lindsay, see you on Monday” (they don’t have this on Fridays) and even though I tried to explain they didn’t understand that I wasn’t coming back. I feel like I just helped these kids and the teacher, and everything was working and I love kids and now I can just see there faces on Monday when they realize I’m gone and I don’t want them to think I’ve abandoned them because I’ve already heard so many stories about people who have lost their parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings. Today was overall a really hard day for everyone, but we knew before even coming to South Africa that this week was going to be hard.
