Day 3 Bukwini Village

This is what we came for.  No group that has come to Bukwini has stayed in the village at night and no group has made home visits.  (Back to staying in the village in a moment). Today we divided into teams of three to four with a Xhosa-speaking interpreter and visited the homes of the caregivers of sponsored orphans who are on the food distribution list.  I wish I could describe what we saw… heard… smelled.  Rufus, Ghehardt, Roy and I stayed behind in the morning and talked (I mostly listened) strategy for the Transkei.  When the first team returned from their morning round of visits, several immediately burst into tears when they entered the room.  What they experienced was overwhelming.   

Small round mud/dung huts, hot…hot…hot – oppressive and dark.  18 people lived on one, with a mother who was dying of AIDS.  She was scared.  The hopelessness of the situations was overwhelming.  In some houses though, we encountered joy, especially in the children.  We measured and weighed the children, took blood pressures, and measured the heads of babies.  We were checking to see if they were malnourished.  In one hut a team encountered a 13 year old boy whose dad had died and his mother abandoned him.  Basically she was a prostitute.  (Odd, because in most of the homes there are no fathers.)  The boy was completely alone and fending for himself.  He had only what he was wearing.  I’ll post more about these visits later.

We’ve taken over the home of the village committee leader Ndinjani and his wife.  They seem honored to have us feeling at home.  “At home” is relative.  I won’t write about the bathroom situation here, but will let the pictures speak for themselves later.  We are eating things we would normally not eat… sleeping on the floor of a thatch-roofed hut… washing (or attempting to) by standing in a small bucket… and generally living like the villagers.  Man, it would be a tough life.  Did I mention that it’s HOT?  And then it pours down rain.