06/08/10

We spent our time in Swaziland at Cabrini Ministries, run by the two wonderful Sisters Barbara and Diane. On their mission grounds they have a primary and secondary school, a clinic, a hostel for 126 orphans, a boarding house for students, a clinic, a police house, and many staff and volunteers. After being here long enough to have seen some poorly organized and operated organizations, it was incredibly heartening and inspiring to see such a well-run organization that is making tangible improvements in the lives of the people in their community.
As part of the health care program, nurses do visits to the homesteads of HIV positive people who don’t or can’t go to the clinic for treatment. One of the nurses is fairly new and doesn’t know how to drive yet, so my dad drove him that day, allowing us to spend the day visiting these homesteads and seeing more of the country. Their mission is in what is called the “low veld” and it is just a dry, barren, desolate land. I had never considered before how much the surrounding environment has improved my mental state here, but the environment there is fairly depressing! We drove for kilometers and kilometers, each time turning onto an even “sider” side road, none of which were paved (even the road the mission is on isn’t paved). At one point during the day my dad stopped and said the nurse would have to walk the rest of the way because he was afraid the car would get stuck in the sand and there was no space between the brush on either side to turn the car around. The people on the homesteads were bewildered to see us, but a couple of them expressed their overwhelming gratitude to the nurse, us, and the Cabrini mission that people cared enough to come all the way out to treat themselves or their family member who is too sick or poor to travel to the clinic. At one point I had to go to the bathroom so I asked the nurse to ask the woman we were visiting (at none of the homesteads we visited did people speak English) if I could use her latrine. The nurse laughed and told me they don’t have latrines, they just go in the bushes, so I asked him to ask her if I could use her bushes. I know my experience in Mozambique has been quite limited, but I have not encountered people not even having latrines here.
The second day we got to two out with two men who work at the mission, setting up tents for homesteads with a person with Tuberculosis, allowing this person to live separately and reduce the chances of infecting other family members. What malaria is to Mozambique, Tuberculosis is to Swaziland, and as they have recently begun focusing on testing for Tuberculosis, they have been recording rates higher than anyone was aware.
I was fortunate enough to be able to sit in on many meetings while I was there—nurses meetings, clinic staff meetings, childcare staff meetings, etc. As I said before, it is wonderful to see just an organized and efficient organization in operation, and to see all the compassionate and dedicated people at work.