Amatikulu

Before I tell you about my a-mazing week, please take a minute to appreciate last nights sleep, where you probably slept peacefully, without waking in the middle of the night to little lizards dropping on you and spiders crawling all over you. You probably slept not in a hot, stuffy, humid, stale-air room, smelling outhouses and sweat.... but in a climate controlled house smelling of tide and fabric softener. You didn't wake up in the middle of the night, begging your bladder to magically expand, because if it didn't, you wouldn't casually be flipping on the nearest light switch steps away from your shiny, clean, porcelain toilet, but.... clumsily striking a match to light the candle guiding you cautiously (you don't want to step on any snakes!) out to the dark, smelly, and dirty outhouse. And then, of course, when you finally (or easily) did fall back asleep, you probably awoke to a snow blower and not to roosters cock-a-doodle-dooing and those little lizards scratching their nails all over the metal roof directly above your head.

But.... even tho sleeping was pretty awful, I still had a beyond fabulous week. We traveled to Amatikulu, right near the coast, and the views were amazing! My mama was a Community Health Worker in the area. So we walked miles with her through the fields, in the heat, up and down hills (she is amazing! and totally in shape!) from family to family. We generally covered 1 or 2 families an hour. She was responsible for educating the families on things like the importance of hand washing, having a garbage hole, having a toilet, TB, the care of an ill baby, clean water, food prep, and more. The families we went to might have had electricity, but didn't have running water.

My mama is doing so much for her community (like many of the other CHW's in Amatikulu). She applied for and received a giant water tank that families can come to for clean water (it is refilled by a truck once a week). They are also applying for their community to get electricity, running water, and flushing toilets.

My mama is 26, and has a 6 year old son. She lives with her mother, her brother, his wife, and their 2 year old son. I had the most amazing food and even tho sleeping was a bit awful, the fact that we didn't have electricity or running water didn't even matter. The families that we saw were also amazing. Every family we saw was laughing and joking the entire time we were there, despite a bare minimum of material possessions. One family I will remember consisted of an unrelated 26 yr old women and a 19 yr old girl, both without parents and both terribly skinny, obviously suffering from HIV or some type of terrible disease. And yet they laughed so hard the entire time, they were both just radiating warmth and joy.

This weekend we're off to the Drakensburg Mtns, with next week being another rural homestay, Impendle. I'm sure I'll have more interesting stories to share then!

Hambani Kahle!