There is a nine year old girl who spends her days looking after her infant nephew because her twenty-five year old aunt decided that this year she wants to finish schooling. It was one or the other who got to go to school. The nine year old is dependent on her aunt because both her parents have died. Social services have been asked to look into it, but it is well known how overwhelmed social services are in such areas.
Some young boy is being teased by other school boys for having AIDS. But, a woman explained to us, he doesn’t have AIDS, he has HIV and he is on ARVs.
Two young orphans are caring for their uncle, who is incredibly sick. Their grandmother and aunt are rather in the other hut. It is up to the two orphans to provide the care.
A woman realised it would be easier to get her niece and nephew onto the R200+ Child Support grants by using her own name, rather than their HIV-positive mother’s name. Their mother has since died and they now should be able to receive the R700+ monthly Foster Care grant, but they cannot prove that their mother died because their aunt’s name is on their forms as their guardian.
Later today, a handful of kids who do not have adult support in their own homes will go back to a community member’s house where they will be able to do their homework with support.
A few days back, a child received a wheel chair in a rural school and the school members went around the school doing what they could to make the area “wheel chair friendly”.
3 comments:
Bless your soul!
I don't know how you do the work you do. Things like this make me very sad and yet do nothing about it.
Well done
Thanks guys... in a way... except I sit in offices, "managing" projects around these people, & occasionally being able to get insight into reality, and for a good while now (too long) I have not had the privilege of meeting these people I typed about here. So, for me, it is much easier than those people I met with yesterday, and the people that those people also manage...
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