Milk, meetings and man-flu

My usual morning routine is to get up between 5:30 & 5:45am, have a shower, lots of breakfast and spend a while reading my Bible and praying before work at 8am. However, since being ill, I have been trying to get as much rest as possible, even sleeping in until 7am! Then I spend the morning chilling out, or working at home, preparing myself for the Family Centre, which seems to finish me off in a couple of hours! So this morning, I was sitting in bed, eating my first breakfast and watching a movie at 8:30am when my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number and it’s still quite an effort to talk, so I didn’t want to speak to someone I didn’t know. Well, when I tried to get into my voicemail, it wanted me to do a password and record my name etc but I couldn’t talk, so I tried to bypass it, unsuccessfully. Now I think it says something along the lines of, I’m sorry “this option is not available” is not available, please leave a message after the tone ☺
It turned out to be Linda, asking me to pick up some packets of milk on my way to work. I remember when I was out here in July, packets of milk seemed like a rubbish idea! It’s basically like a sealed plastic bag containing 1l of milk, then you snip the corner off & put the whole packet in a jug, now I can’t imagine milk in a bottle!
I dawdled for a while longer and eventually rocked up at work at about 11am. I completely forgot I was going to bring sandwiches to work as Wednesday is samp & beans day. Most people love samp & beans, but I really can’t stand it, there’s just so many onions. I have given it a fair go, eating it on numerous occasions, but today I decided enough was enough. And then I forgot the butties.
I quickly caught up with Linda, then went to finish off sorting through the bigger craft things that had been donated. It turns out Thembekile had done a fantastic job finishing off the craft cupboard yesterday, it was such a relief, she gives me hope! I then hung out with the ECD children until 1:30pm when I had a meeting with Nonhlanhla, one of the child care workers, to put a bit more flesh on the bones of the holiday club plan. The meeting went OK, it all seems to be coming on quite well now, so Linda is not quite as stressed as this time last week!
Tired, hungry and poorly, I decided to call it a day at the Family Centre. I thought I’d best pop in on Zwe as he spent most of yesterday in hospital having lots of tests done. Yesterday he told me it had all gone OK but wouldn’t tell me what they had found. So, I went to his house, knocked on the door and let myself in. Zwe was curled up fast asleep on one of the armchairs. I said hello (“sawubona”) to his mum then plonked myself down and waited for him to wake up. The TV was on, and as it’s the end of year exams at the moment, there was a revision program on, so I brushed up on quadratic equations, I can’t believe all that information is still in my head! After a while, he woke up, clearly surprised to see me so early, as I don’t normally finish work until 5pm. I asked how he was and he said “tired”, so I probed a bit further and he said he has TB. Luckily, it’s only in the early stages, so he should be fine, but he has to take medication for 6 months. I felt quite bad for all the times I teased him about having man-flu - I thought I had won the “who’s sickest” competition with my tonsillitis, but he always has to outdo me! We sat there quietly for some time, then I thought about my cough and whether I had TB (they don’t call me the drama queen for nothing!) but then I remembered I’ve had my BCG twice, so I’d have to be the world’s unluckiest person to get TB now. Again though, the anger boiled up within me that the chances of me, or anyone in the UK getting TB are so tiny, whereas here, it’s quite a major risk.
Zwe said that there was a lady in the same ward as him who had it really bad and when they compared the 2 x-rays, he was filled with sadness. He said she was given the treatment too, but the doctor’s told her she was so close to death. I can’t believe this world exists. Where people are so poor they can’t afford healthcare, so when they get a cough, they assume it will go away, and months down the line, on death’s doorstep, they end up in hospital with a pretty grim prognosis. I wish there was more I could do. I wish I could change the world. I hate the fact that night after night, I could sit here at my computer and write nothing but stories of misery and death. I’m sure this isn’t the way God intended the world to be.

---

Part of trip: South Africa Sep to Dec 09

---