Punching the Time Clock

As you may have noticed, some time has lapsed since my last blog entry. The reason for this is simple: every time I sit down with good intentions to work on my blog, I just get completely overwhelmed. I have a thousand things I want to share, but getting them from my brain to the blog in a cohesive way challenges me to no end. Then I just post nothing, making it more difficult and overwhelming the next time I want to sit down and write something. It’s a vicious, perpetuating cycle. So instead, I am just going to pick a random topic for my blog post and talk a lot about it. Today the topic is work.

As I shared in a previous post, back in November I moved from a more direct volunteer role doing education activities with the children to managing the GGA Child Sponsorship Program. I’ll give some of the nitty gritties of the program. I manage the program with one other person, a German volunteer named Markus. Our program provides food parcels and educational assistance to children and families living in the impovershed valleys of Sankontshe and neighboring valley Mophela, Swayimane, Kwa-Ximba (the “X” makes a clicking sound in Zulu which is really hard/fun to pronounce), and Willowfontein. First, we provide the children and families with a food parcel each month. Before I came to South Africa, I always imagined food parcels in Africa as something dropped out of a plane by the UN. That’s not at all the way we do it. Instead, Markus and I plan a “food drop week”. For example, we go to Sankontshe and Mophela on Monday, Swayimane on Tuesday, and so on and so on in each of the valleys each day. We take either a big industrial-sized truck or a couple normal sized trucks, and load them up with all the things in the food parcels we distribute (corn “mealie” meal, rice, beans, and a plastic bag filled with living essentials). We do a couple of big drops at a community centers where approximately 70 people come to collect their parcel or we drive to individual houses or groups of houses to give out parcels. It’s a lot of hard, dirty, sweaty work distributing the 300 food parcels. After each food drop I’m usually covered in dirt and mealie meal and absolutely so exhausted I can’t move. I’ve taken some of the best naps of my life on top of leftover bags of mealie meal.

The second thing our program provides is educational assistance for children in the program, which are school fees, uniform and supplies. For the past three months we’ve been measuring children for their new school uniforms. In November we started the process by having measurement events where children in the program came to local community centers to be measured for their uniforms. Since then, we have been measuring the kids at the monthly food drops. In addition, we’ve been contacting local schools to identify school fees, which differ depending on the approximately 20 schools the children in the program attend. Then we also have the task of obtaining school supply lists from all of the schools and buying school supplies for all the children in the program.

Another big part of our job is profiling and updating families and children in the program. The way people get on the program is through the community health workers (CHWs) in the valleys. The CHWs tell us which families and children are in need of assistance. When the CHWs tell us that a child or family is in need, we go and profile the family with the CHWs at their home. We fill out a basic form with their situation, and then send this profile to a sponsor. Once a year (around Christmas) the sponsor gets an update about their sponsor child or family. For the last few months going to visit families and children on the program to get updates has taken up a big chunk of our work time. The update usually contains information about how the family or child’s situation has changed, and then other interesting information such as the family’s best moment of the year or the child’s favorite new game.

This volunteering thing is work. It’s a mixture of the most heart-breaking stuff I’ve ever dealt with and the most rewarding moments in life. The other day a family in the valley was driving back from a funeral and got into a car accident with a Greyhound bus. All eight people in the family died. It’s hard to even fathom, you know? In an instant, all of the sisters from one family are gone. Since families of the deceased are often responsible for feeding funeral go-ers in Zulu culture, we took some emergency food parcels to the remaining family members since they would essential be having eight funerals. We sat and prayed with the family, sang with the family and talked with the family. I cannot even imagine how the family will cope and come back from something like this. Situations like this, which sadly are all too frequent here, keep me awake at night.

There are also some things that I love so much about my job I can hardly stand it and make my cheeks hurt from smiling too much. I love riding through the valleys in the car with the windows down. Markus always has to slow down to not hit the goats and cows that stand in the middle of the road, completely indifferent to the fact that we need to get by. Also, at one food drop, one of the women there made everyone bow to pray. It was all in Zulu, meaning that I understood approximately 2% of it, but it basically was thanking God for the food. Even though I do not do this job to be thanked, it is amazing to see the amount of gratitude that some of the families and children have for the program.

While I love working in the valleys in our program, I also love working with the children who live at GGA. Every other weekend volunteers are required to work, and so every other weekend I work with the the “creche” children, ages two to four years old. Oh man, they are so cute I could eat them with a spoon. I really like how with kids that young, you can make ANYTHING fun. We eat apples, we play hide and go seek (they’re still too young to be good at hiding, so it’s pretty adorable), we read books, we roll in the grass, we dance (they have more rhythm at age three than I will ever have), etc. My favorite part of working with them is singing them to sleep, and perhaps it’s because they don’t care that I can’t carry a tune to save my life. My favorite songs to sing to them are Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head and Close to You. They really like to sing Jesus Loves the Little Children and Silent Night, even though it isn’t Christmas and it contains a note so high I can only dream of hitting it (the first “sleep in heavenly peace”).

So, that’s my work.