It's time to travel!
After almost 3 months in South Africa it's finally time to travel! It's not that we don't like our project anymore but after such a long time of cutting, glueing, varnishing, categorizing and printing we feel absolutely ready for holidays. Nevertheless I am already missing the babys when I think about not seeing them for three weeks and I'm sure that they will grow a lot in the time we're not here.
I don't want to yet reveal too much about our holiday plans, all I can tell you is that we are planning to travel the Garden Route and spend Christmas and New Year in Cape Town. Of course I will tell you aout everything that we saw and did a lot more detailed as soon as I'm back in January. But until then I will keep you up-to-date with my travel advent calendar. From tomorrow on I will post one new picture every day for 24 days. So stay tuned for the most current pictures!
World Aids Day
This week
we finally had to do some work that was new to us: We accompanied two of the
Cotlands social workers on their regular trips to Soweto where they are doing
home visits within the scope of one of our community projects. The children
that we were visiting were between four and nine years old and most of them mentally or physically
disabled. Additionally they were all HIV positive and living in extremely poor
circumstances. Even without any disability it must be hard to live in a small and
leaky shanty at the uneven backyard of a little house… Anyway we went there to
check if they are developing good, if they are getting their medication and to
bring them a small Christmas present. It was very interesting to get a closer
look at different families’ lives and homes but at the same time it was
startling how such young children can be hit by so many strokes of fate.
Today we
had the chance to join the later celebration of World Aids Day of a Cotlands
support group for mothers with HIV positive children. As South Africa is the
country with the second highest HIV rate in the world (ca. 18%) HIV is a very
important subject here that unfortunately still doesn’t get enough attention.
The celebration also took place in Soweto and about 50 people were taking
place. At first many hopeful church songs were sung. After that some women had
prepared little sketches and speeches but unfortunately most of it was in Zulu
so that we couldn’t really understand a lot. Then everyone could write down a
message to God. All in all we realized again that there was no sad mood like
one could maybe expect at all. The atmosphere was much more happy because of
the often repeated fact that you can have a happy life even if you are HIV
infected and it was very impressive how many of these women arranged with their
situations.
In the end many of the people came over and
thanked us for attending the celebration and showing solicitousness and
interest which made us a little bit speechless because we didn’t really feel as
if we would have done anything that they would have to thank us for. Instead we
were happy that they let us take part into the celebration. But that’s
something that you also get used to in South Africa: Everyone is saying thank
you for everything no matter how self-evident it seems to be.
