Wednesday at The Seed

Wednesday at The Seed

The first thing I need to do is make a correction to Monday's blog.  Whenever you saw the word 'mess' it was supposed to be 'meds'. Auto correct can be a tricky thing and I hate proof reading.  There was an unfortunate sentence where you may have read about Kaisa 'flinging his mess' but it was' Kaisa taking his meds'.  It's been corrected now.

Wednesday Was a full day at the Seed.  We had some down time in the morning and I went in had a chat with one of the workers, Gloria.  She has a very difficult ministry here, she runs the food and clothing hamper program.  The Seed has limited resources for buying food and their mandate is not to supply food to everyone who comes in and asks.  The Seed will supply food to people in crisis but not to people who should be able to provide for themselves.  If you can imagine being the person in charge of making those decisions and the difficulty in having to turn people away in tough love!

Gloria is an amazing Zulu woman though.  Her parents were Christians, and she accepted the Lord for herself as a teenager.  She has lived in this community her whole life and so is a great resource for the Seed.  I asked her about making the tough decisions and she said it could be very tough, but The Seed has pretty defined criteria for her to follow which helps.  She first asks about who is living in the house and if anyone is working or getting grants ( equate it to our various Social Services). Then she talks about how many children are in the home.  Usually she knows of the family and has a pretty good sense right off the bat of whether they are telling the truth or not.  For the times she doesn't know the people, she will go out and talk to the neighbors or schools to get a sense of the situation.  She is very dedicated to following God and making the right decisions each time.  

She told me about a couple of situations where someone comes in who is not sick or old, but hasn't been able to get work, when they come in and are hungry and ask for food, it is really tough to turn them away but she has to.  There are also times when a family doesn't meet criteria, but she senses the need is great and she will prepare a hamper for them once and then makes it very clear to them that they won't be able to come back for more food unless they meet the criteria.  Then there are families who they give food to each month to supplement what they get themselves.  There is one Gogo (grandma) who has had 3 of her 5 girls die leaving behind 15 grandchildren for her to take care of.  One grandma taking in 15 little ones!  There are 'Foster' grants for when you take in orphans but it is still a pretty small amount.  Then Gloria said her other 2 daughters and their children are living in the same little house!  There are some amazing stories here!

The Seed of Hope's sewing ministry makes things geared towards the North American market and when people travel back and forth they bring the items to sell.  They are trying out a new pattern for a yoga style pant and one of the ladies, Belinda is making me a pair.  So I tried them on yesterday and they fit really well, she really did a great job!  It turned out that Kerry and Ernestina were going to Belinda's house so I was invited to go with them.  We were taking some food with us.  Along the way I found out her father had passed away a couple of weeks ago, and she had just gotten back from being at the funeral.  So we were going over to give our condolences.  We parked on the side of one of the roads and walked down into the area carrying the food.  We came to her place and it was a square mud building of two rooms.  The yard was small and neat and there was a tiny garden beside the house.  We went in and I think she knew we were coming because there was nothing in the first little room except some really nice furniture.  It seemed a little too nice.  Judging from the outside of the house, the other room would have been too small to have beds in it, and she lives there with her husband and her 2 children.  I really hope she did not borrow, or worse, pay for that furniture just for our visit.  You could tell she was uncomfortable and shy about us being there. 
(As a side, since I wrote this I asked Kerry about the furniture and she said it is Belinda's furniture, maybe a wedding present.  In Zulu culture, it is a huge priority to have a conversation area.  It is bad manners to come into a home and not sit down right away.  It represents your intentions to stay and visit and invest time in their lives.)
We chatted for a little bit with her and her husband Isaac.  For every question we asked there seemed to be a need, but I would never have known about it from seeing her at the Seed.  I have noticed that's another cultural thing here.  In Canada, we are much quicker to try to bring attention to our problems.  We are quicker at playing the woe is me card.  Here they are on the far side of the spectrum in that you would not know of an imminent need unless you pressed them.  There should be a healthy middle somewhere.

An example of not telling about problems is a worker at the Seed whose son is in real danger of being killed by a gang, to the point where the community has stopped talking to him because he is considered dead already.  She is afraid to even sleep in her home.  But it took Kerry, her mentor, a week to get it out of her even though she had known something was up.

Belinda's prayer requests included work for Isaac and herself.  She has saved up enough to buy a sewing machine so she can do repairs and sewing for people in her community for some money, but they don't have electricity to their home.  They ordered and paid for it in May, but they are still waiting for the workers to come out. Kerry asked if she had called the electric company to follow up, and they didn't realize they could even do that.  So we are praying for electricity.  We are praying for her mother who is alone and sick now far away from here.  The rainy seasons are coming in the next weeks and she doesn't have plaster on her home yet, which means the rain will just dissolve the walls.  Also there is flooding in her home when it rains.  They are near the bottom of a ravine and I think the water table is high because she was saying the water comes up out of the ground into the home.  Kerry took a look at the garden there, and there is a big difference between that garden, and the gardens growing at The Seed.  The biggest difference I can see is that the earth is just open to the elements.  Without the mulch covering the ground it dries it out and won't hold the moisture.  Kerry tried to explain it again but I don't know if they will do it.  Here it is more common that people will tell you what they think you want to hear than the actual truth.

We went out for more home visits with the medical team as well.  We took a food parcel to Kaisa, the man I met on Monday.  He had been to the welfare centre on Tuesday to try to apply for help.  The ladies are really happy to see him up and walking around.  When I see him walk it looks painful, but she says he walks 10 kms to the hospital, amazing!  If only he would take his meds on time.

Then we went to visit a young lady named Pell who is HIV positive and has had TB for a few months.  She is in a small tin hut with room for 2 double beds where she is living with her mom and sister.  She is not responding well to the drugs and is not getting better.  They dressed her and we went in for a visit.  She slowly got down on her knees and we prayed for her.  Her mom was crying and we stayed and talked for a while with her as well until she calmed down again, it would be a very hard thing to see your child so sick, no matter how old they were.

The last lady we went and saw was hard for me.  She was so ill.  She was an old Gogo who was so tiny under her blankets.  She was living in a modest home where she had 2 other Gogo's taking care of her.  She was well cared for, clean and they made sure to keep moving her so she didn't get any sores.  But she was near death.  She was breathing so quickly and so shallowly I didn't think she was getting any breath.  This was the first time the medical team had met her and she had never been tested for HIV so they tested her.  When they pricked her finger there was no reaction from her, and they had to prick her twice to get enough blood for the test.  She tested negative so the teams suspects she is dying of old age.  She is surrounded with her pictures of her family and she is well cared for.  She did perk up when we gathered around her and prayed for her.  She is a Christian. 

We took one of the workers, Musa, to lunch.  He is a young Zulu man who has been to university and through his church came and started volunteering.  They did some spiritual gift testing and he scored very high in teaching and administrative skills.  Within three months they gave him a paid position and he is the receptionist and he teaches the middle primary classes in the after school program.  He teaches life skills like money, sexually transmitted diseases, HIV information, hygiene, ethics etc.  Last year, the leader at the Seed encouraged him to take his curriculum out to the schools and he now teaches 8 classes in 2 different schools.  It really is good to see some of the Zulu men taking a leadership position.  The young boys really need good solid role models because sadly, traditional Zulu culture has not produced many solid men.  He has also started a soccer club in his township where the kids learn soccer and life skills.

That's enough for one day I think!