Home Visits

Yesterday I got the opportunity to go on home visits with the caregivers.  Home visits are when the caregivers walk to Kwa Zenzele (the township right next to St. Martins) and visit with different families in their homes to see how St. Martins or any social worker can help them.  Sometimes this help entails providing food parcels for the family, finding a school with transportation for the children, or giving them clothing/blankets.  Many of the people living in these houses are HIV positive or orphaned and vulnerable children without any form of identification.  Often times they get offended and embarrassed when these caregivers come to their homes, because they view it as being looked down upon and judged.  This is understandable because the caregivers ask very personal questions to the families only to find out how to help them in the best way possible.  Also, it is very common for the caregivers to show up to a scheduled home visit and have no one be home.  The inhabitants sometimes runaway before the caregivers can get to their house so they don’t have to deal with this confrontation, this happened in the third house I visited.

Yesterday, I got to go inside two houses.  The first house only had one person living in it.  He was an 18-year-old boy, whose mother recently passed away.  This kid was originally living with his older brother, mom and stepfather, attending school and staying out of trouble.  When his mother became sick, the young boy dropped out of school to help take care of her.  Once she finally passed the stepfather and the boy separated and the older brother moved out, so this young teen is now living on his own.  This boy does not go to school because he is 18 and only at grade level 9, meaning his classmates would only be 13 years old.  Because he is no longer in school, he does not receive food parcels from the government anymore and is completely on his own.  When we showed up to the house, 4 other friends who also were not attending school scurried out so we could talk to the owner alone.  For the most part the only language people in Kwa Zenzele speak is Zulu, so it was very hard for me to keep up with what was going on.  Even though I could not understand the words being said, I was still able to use my other senses to figure out what was happening.  The first thing I noticed was the smell of marijuana and I was able to assume that the children who exited the house so we could enter were smoking weed right before we came.  Also, there was one mattress on the floor with a dirty blanket covering it and piles of trash surrounding this mattress.  The house was made of scrap pieces of steel with many holes in the roof, so when it rains everything must get soaked.  Also, when the caregivers were speaking to the boy he would not look any of us in the eye and kept his head down and his answers short.  Walking into this house and seeing this boy who is just a little younger than me, living by himself and in these conditions was probably the hardest things I have ever seen.  After the visit the caregivers filled me in on what happened during the meeting.  They informed me that this boy doesn’t feel comfortable going to school because of his age, but is willing to give his education another try.  One thing the workers at St. Martins are going to do is talk to the president at one of the night schools in Springs, where people of all ages go to get their degrees.  This will allow this teen to go back to school as well as continue to get food parcels so he can eat.

One very surprising thing I learned yesterday while on the home visits, is that sometimes the best way to help someone living in poverty is not by giving them more food, but instead give them material objects.  This was the case for the second family I visited.  The tiny shack that they live in houses four children, a husband and a wife.  It is one room with a small stove and a mattress on the floor.  The four children sleep on the mattress while the parents sleep on the hard ground.  They receive food parcels from the government and are able to buy additional food because the father has a job on the farm.  He makes very little and that is their only source of income for the family of 6, so they do not have any money to buy clothes or blankets.  Thankfully these children do attend school, but do not have warm clothes and the winters in South Africa can get as cold as 30 degrees.  They are in dire need of blankets and jackets to sleep with and stay warm.  Now that these caregivers at St. Martins know how little this family has they are now able to organize a way for this family to their necessary needs and try to make sure that they stay warm in the winter.

I have never experienced or seen anything like this and it will be something I will never forget.  I plan on going on these home visits every Monday and Wednesday and hopefully I will be able to meet many families and help them in anyway possible.

On a happier/cuter note, here is little Bufana trying on my knee brace and a picture of a stunning sunset I took yesterday.