The hardest thing about this place is so much goes unspoken and therefore unnoticed. Sometimes we forget that the majority of people here live in homes without running water and electricity, even people that work with us. This hit me hard when Tim was telling us about a lady that we work closely with whose tiny home has a roof that leaks directly onto her bed. She just deals with it, no fuss, no drama. If Tim hadn't have been to her house it would have continuted to go unnoticed. Next week we're going to help rebuild her roof, with roofing donated by a man who read Tim's blog. Its great that we are in a position to help but still heartbreaking that this is just one person out of millions who are suffering in silence and the hardest thing is knowing you are unable to help everyone, a fact that seemed to hit us all hard this week.
The feeling of desperation increased as we got on with our daily activities this week. When driving to sports on Monday we passed 'chicken', a boy involved with our sports programme, whose younger brother Siphe attends our rainbow smiles group. Their mother is a patient at Thembacare, Thembalitsha's hospital and she has just come off her medication, meaning she does not have long to live. Its absolutely heartbreaking that she will soon be leaving her two young sons behind and yet the boys don't sit around feeling sorry for themselves they just get on with everyday life. It is clear that heatbreak and loss has just become a fundamental part of life here, with around 34% of the town living with the virus, its so easy for death to just become another statistic. Yet when you know the family personally, its so painful to see the effect this virus can have. At rainbow smiles, we were talking about who we can trust and when asked who the kids trusted most in the world, Siphe said his mother, my heart broke in that moment for that boy who will soon be without his mum, the one person he trusts most in the world.
Continuing onto sports we picked up one of our amazing sports mentors who told us about a 15 yr old boy from his school that had been stabbed at the weekend, another invisible tragedy that we would not have known about if it weren't for the words of someone involved. And to top it all off at the end of the day, when dropping one of the house mums off in one of the townships we witnessed a boy being beaten by a man, presumably his dad. There was nothing we could do but to drive on. What are the chances that the boy would tell anyone of this horrific abuse. Its highly likely that his suffering would go unspoken and that no-one but us would ever know of his pain that night, and probably many other nights.
The feeling of desperation increased as we got on with our daily activities this week. When driving to sports on Monday we passed 'chicken', a boy involved with our sports programme, whose younger brother Siphe attends our rainbow smiles group. Their mother is a patient at Thembacare, Thembalitsha's hospital and she has just come off her medication, meaning she does not have long to live. Its absolutely heartbreaking that she will soon be leaving her two young sons behind and yet the boys don't sit around feeling sorry for themselves they just get on with everyday life. It is clear that heatbreak and loss has just become a fundamental part of life here, with around 34% of the town living with the virus, its so easy for death to just become another statistic. Yet when you know the family personally, its so painful to see the effect this virus can have. At rainbow smiles, we were talking about who we can trust and when asked who the kids trusted most in the world, Siphe said his mother, my heart broke in that moment for that boy who will soon be without his mum, the one person he trusts most in the world.
Continuing onto sports we picked up one of our amazing sports mentors who told us about a 15 yr old boy from his school that had been stabbed at the weekend, another invisible tragedy that we would not have known about if it weren't for the words of someone involved. And to top it all off at the end of the day, when dropping one of the house mums off in one of the townships we witnessed a boy being beaten by a man, presumably his dad. There was nothing we could do but to drive on. What are the chances that the boy would tell anyone of this horrific abuse. Its highly likely that his suffering would go unspoken and that no-one but us would ever know of his pain that night, and probably many other nights.
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