15, August 2005

Monday was our first day in Kayamandi. Kayamandi is a township outside of Stellenbosh, which is not far from Cape Town. The town sits up on a hill that once used to be a vineyard. On the vineyard, the workers, who were Kosa from Eastern Cape, lived in stone buildings dormitory style and the farmers lived in houses. As the surrounding vineyards disappeared, the Kosans squated the land and built shacks made out of wood and tin. There is no running water or toilets in the sacks. There are community toilets designated per zone. I don’t know how many people there are per zone, It’s hard to explain the layout of these shacks, the conditions are a bit overwhelming for me. I cannot believe that in this day 2005, with so much technology and modernization surrounding this community in the white areas that people would still be living like this, but they do. As we walked thru the town thru the shacks using the dirt walkways, alleys and roads, I could smell sewage, the fuel they use for heat, human sweat, dirty clothes, food, piss in the dirt and sometimes when the wind blows really hard, I can get a wiff of the fresh mountain air that comes off the beautiful mountains surrounding this area. Nomcuzo, a young woman infected with HIV is our guide and translator. She takes us to the shacks of those people who are infected with HIV and are sick. We visited a woman, Bulwelo, who earlier in the year was very sick and could not walk due to untreated HIV. Charlie told me her story, they had to carrry her into the clinic. She lives in a shack that has concrete floor and one room. The one room served as her bedroom, kitchen, lounge and sometimes restroom by bucket. She was standing outside her door talking to a neighbor with a smaller shack. She greet us with a big smile, “Moleweni”, (Hello)...we start to talk to her and ask how she is doing. She tells us all sbout her sickness and how much better she has gotten since she started on meds. She was alive, animated, happy and very hospitable. She wanted us to go to a women’s support group she goes to at the community resource center called Prokorus. It’s an HIV women’s support group. Support groups were unheard of a couple of years ago before Charlie came. The people would not acknowledge the Aids pandemic in their community. And for one to say they had the virus would put a taboo on them. They are outkasts and no one wanted anything to do with them. Even their own families would disown them. So, for these women to be going to this group is a miracle. We left her shack and continued our walk through the town. I couldn’t believe this never ending sea of shacks. Just about every other block, the were Cash Stores that looked just like any other shack except for the “Coke” signs and Cash Store signs on the outside walls. There were even shacks where cell phones and pagers are sold. I don’t get that. These poor people who don’t even have restrooms spending their money on cell phones, I seen kids walking around with them just like in America. Ev ery once in awhile, we came up on a flow of water coming down troad, At first I thought the water was coming down because of the recent rains, but I soon fournd out it was sewage coming from a backed up sewer. There is a pic of one in the archives for August. Imagine the smell and some of these water flows went by the front of some of these shacks or in the walkways between shacks. We ended up at a woman who is about 33 years old and has aids. She looks older than me. She cannot walk because she has lost movement from her knees down. Her feet have a twist that turns inward. When we walked in her shack at eh very top of the north hill, I can see out her window to a beautiful, breathtaking view of the mountains. She was sitting up in bed with her feet in a bucket of warmed water with soap. She was dressed in a granny type pajama dress with a granny looking knit sweater and a fleece beanie over her head. The shack had 2 rooms, a living room that had her bed in it and a bedroom. She didn’t have a kitchen setup like most of the shacks. She had a tin can with some stuff burning that was radiating heat. The fumes from this are almost unbearable. There was only a table , a bench, and a bed in that room and all she had for food in the house was on the table and that was a half a loaf of bread. She said that she really had no one to take care of her. She said she had a brother living with her with her that drank and sometimes when he is drunk, he throws her out, wheelchair and all! When we sat in her shack, I knew God had led us there to her particular house. We heard her story and then we prayed for her. We asked her what she needed, which felt like an overwhelming task, because how do you ask someone like this what they need. I almost don’t want to ask what they need because it feels that we could never do enough, but GOD through us somehow works that out in the little things we do for people. I couldn’t believe her answer, she only asked for sugar, oats, bread, beans and rice. That’s about 10 American dollars! We went back down to Prokuros to meet Charlie.