Sickness, sausages & supergirl!

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So Sunday was not a good day, I was so sick I didn’t even make it to church, which is really saying something! I spent pretty much the whole day in bed watching movies, although by late afternoon I felt well enough to get up and make some cupcakes, yummy! Part way through icing them, I ran out of energy, so they were the plainest cupcakes so far! In the evening, I was invited over to Grant & Shelly’s as it was Andy’s last night in Merrivale. Not wanting to turn down what I was sure would be a fantastic meal, I accepted. Grant had cooked for a change, and he assured me it was traditional a South African dish, then went on to say he had chucked anything he could find in it! It didn’t taste bad considering, I was quite impressed! The meal was a bit of a challenge as I could barely talk, but they assured me that it was fine just to sit and listen - I think they were secretly enjoying it! By the end of the evening, the men were on to the subject of sport & I was listening intently. The conversation steered around to Aussie Rules, where miraculously, my voice came back enough for me to croak about football for a little while. So it turned out to be a very enjoyable evening and I’m certainly glad I went.
On Monday, I stayed at home in the morning, doing more research into biblical weddings for the holiday club and I now consider myself to be an expert! Then, in the afternoon, I went into work for a meeting with Nana, one of the girls who is also helping to plan the holiday club. Whilst I am doing the Jewish part of the weddings, she is doing the Zulu part, which I think will be easier for her to research! In the end, she hadn’t arrived by 3:30pm, so I gave up, feeling very ill, and went home. The main road into Mpophomeni is still being resurfaced, and I found it hysterical that there were 2 blokes with those lollipop signs saying stop & go. What was funny was that they were both saying the same thing, I’m not sure they had quite got the idea, so no cars would go & then all the cars would go at once and end up in a big mess all over the brand new road - oops!
Today, Tuesday, has been quite a busy day. Again this morning, I felt very sick indeed, I didn’t sleep well at all, I now have a cough to add to everything else! So I took it easy in the morning, just finalising the plans for the holiday club. Then I went to the Family Centre for lunch & met with Linda to share my ideas, which she seemed ok with. We also discussed what we were going to cook for the English food thing on the first day of the holiday club, I think we have settled on toad in the hole with gravy & peas, as well as scones during the biscuit break, yum yum! Straight from there, I met with Thembekile, one of the care workers who will soon be in charge of all the craft resources. One of my roles for this 3 months is to train someone up so they can keep on top of all the craft resources, so that when anyone needs to use them for a craft activity, everything they need is in the cupboard. Unfortunately, this requires quite a lot of organizing and generally speaking, that is not something Zulu people excel in! So, I spent about an hour with Thembekile putting everything back all neat, tidy and labeled, but I had to abandon her part way through to do a home visit, I’m a bit nervous to go back in tomorrow!
You may remember me talking about a girl called Nelly. She is quite remarkable, she is 16 years old, is at school full time and also cares for her 3 younger sisters, since her mother died in March. Last time I met Nelly, she had completely lost hope and really couldn’t see a way out of this situation. She couldn’t find enough money to feed her family & pay for the electricity, nor the time to cook, clean and study. It really was a desperate situation. Unfortunately, it has only got worse. As far as I can tell, an aunt has now said she wants to take the 3 younger children away & foster them, but Nelly’s fear is that she is only doing it to get the grant money for them & that she will abuse them. I think the aunt has also got a social worker involved, who says it isn’t right for Nelly to be looking after her sisters. Nelly does a fantastic job and she has the best interests of her family at heart. She makes sure that they go down to the Family Centre every day so they can be fed there, although Nelly herself doesn’t have enough time. Her house is spick and span, you could eat your dinner off the floor, and all her sisters are quite happy there. It is so hard when you hear stories like this, where there is no obvious solution. Nelly’s mum specifically told her before she died that she must keep all the children together in that house, that they mustn’t leave. I think it is decisions like this that make life much harder for Nelly, I think she can cope with the cooking, cleaning & studying etc, but when other people get involved and make her very worried, life becomes infinitely harder. Another one of my roles during my time here is to mentor Nelly, and so my suggestion will be that we organize a volunteer, perhaps from the church, to go to the house and help with all the chores, so Nelly can go to the Family Centre, where she will find the support she needs. Hopefully then, the social worker will see that she can cope and that she gets enough help for her to be able to look after her sisters effectively.
It really puts life into perspective when you see the decisions that some of these children are forced to make. I think there are currently 9 child-headed families at the Centre at the moment, that’s 9 children forced to think like adults, to feed and clothe their siblings, find their school fees and work out what’s best for them. And I thought I had a tough childhood.

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