At the Beach

Just had to make this posting for the pictures!

Last Tuesday, I and the other 3 volunteers on my shift, plus Jayne (the woman from NYC I mentioned in my last blog posting, who is trying to adopt) took some of the young ones to Muizenberg Beach. Muizenberg lies on the False Bay side of the Cape Peninsula, about a 30 minute drive from Baphumelele, and is known for its colorful beach cabanas (which you can see in the background of the first picture). We hired a driver, packed lunches, tried to find shoes that fit for them to wear, and piled 12 children into a mini van for an afternoon at the beach. As far as we know, this is the first time any of them had seen the beach or the ocean - other than trips to the hospital on occasion, they rarely see outside the small street where Baphumelele sits. We made quite the scene when we arrived - all eyes on the beach watched as 12 beautiful black children waddled down to the waterline. We had people coming up to us from all directions asking if they could help us, wanting to hold the childrens' hands as they approached the water and to play with them. The children were hilarious - so afraid, puzzled, and in awe of the water at the same time.

But, we had quite a scare within 10 minutes of our arrival there. One of the little boys with us, Vuyani, collapsed and suffered a seizure as soon as his feet hit the cold ocean water. We yelled for and found a doctor on the beach and the doctor, Marta and Vuyani rushed off to the local hospital. He spent the night at the Red Cross Hospital in Cape Town for observation and testing - unbeknowst to us, he had had a seizure a few months ago as well - and is now fine and back at Bap. We were all very afraid though - petrified - as we did not know exactly what had happened to him.

Other than the incident with Vuyani, the beach outing was a huge success, the children had a great time, and I learned how to put diapers back on sandy children (something that was more humorous than skillful!) 

Wanting to Bring Them Home

If I could, I would pack a few of the children at Baphumelele into my luggage and take them back with me to the U.S.! I have really fallen in love with some of these children. There are three little girls in particular that have stolen my heart…

One of the little girls came to Baphumelele almost a year ago, badly abused. She had burns on her face and most of her body. She also suffers from full-scale AIDs. Although almost 4 years old, she barely speaks and is very tiny for her age. But, from what I’m told, she has made incredible progress in the past 9 months while at Bap. – after she arrived, they did not think she would live very much longer. At first, understandably, she would not let anyone near her, pushed everyone away, and never smiled. She now reaches out for you to pick her up when she sees you coming towards her, smiles at you with the sweetest, small smile, blows kisses at you from across the room, and leans over to kiss the other children on the cheek – especially some of the other little boys. She has the most amazingly quiet and calm nature about her and has very expressive, old eyes. There is something about her spirit that you notice right away – everyone does, she instantly becomes a “favorite” of the volunteers here.

Another one of the little girls’ mother died and then she was abandoned by the rest of her family. She has huge, beautiful, shy eyes and does not immediately warm up to people, but when she does get to know you, she’ll never stop smiling. I took to her instantly – when I first met her she was wearing shoes way too big for her, a faux fur coat with faux leopard trim around the sleeves and carrying around a big purse. She is a very slow and particular eater, one of the only children who does not like to pour food all over herself while eating. She seems healthy to me – other than an occasional skin infection, which most of the children suffer from on and off – and very smart. She helps me set up the little plastic chairs around their lunch tables, sits with me and colors or reads for more than a few minutes, and really tries to talk to me, although, frustratingly, mostly in Xhosa.

The third little girl is quite the character – she makes me laugh every time I see her. She smiles constantly and is always on the move, wobbling across the room. She is almost three but does not make any sounds, other than the occasional whimper or cry. They believe her silence is as a result of trauma she endured when she fell into a coma and almost died a year ago (for reasons I do not know, but am told she has fetal alcohol syndrome), and she attends speech therapy. And, she loves to eat. I’ve never seen a child move across the room as fast as she does when food is brought out!

I would seriously consider adopting any or all of them if it was easier to do for a U.S. citizen, but currently it is not, from what I understand. There is a couple from North Carolina that came to Cape Town a few years ago to volunteer at Bap. They fell in love with a 9-year old girl living here and decided to adopt her. From what everyone tells me, South Africa has almost completely blocked any adoptions by U.S. citizens because the U.S. has not signed a Hague Treaty on international child trafficking. The only feasible way around this (if you are not a movie or pop star), and what the North Carolina couple did, is to move to South Africa for a few years, establish temporary residency, foster the child, and then adopt. The couple’s adoption of the little 9-year old girl went through this past November – she is now 11 years old – and they will move back to North Carolina this coming summer.

This past week a 42-year old woman from New York City joined us out at Bap. In the past year and half, she has been an Aviva volunteer at Bap. for three different 6-week stints. This time, she is here for only two weeks to visit Nana, a 3-year old boy at Bap., that she desperately wants to adopt. She previously has met with members of Parliament, social workers and lawyers here and they have all basically told her the same thing: South Africa will not allow U.S. adoptions right now and her best bet would be to move here. She is still trying, however, and has heard that in 2007 the U.S. plans to sign the Hague Treaty, which could change the adoption landscape here. She also wonders to herself whether adopting Nana is the right thing to do – and so goes the other argument about taking him out of his environment and away from his culture, especially by a white person. I understand those arguments, but when I sat out at an outdoor Christmas concert at Kirstenbosch Gardens last Friday night, as the sun set behind Table Mountain which encircles the Gardens, I could not help but think about the children at Bap. and wish so much that they each had their own family, whether from South Africa or the U.S, black or white, that could take them to such a concert as well. 

Getting Dirty

Here’s more about a typical day volunteering at Baphumelele and, although I’m going to tell you a little more about the nitty, gritty of Bap, I want to emphasize at the outset that the life for the children at Bap is 100x better than the alternative for them, and Bap does provide them with a lot of good attention and care…

After another great three days off in Cape Town, this time touring the wine country outside the city and Robben Island, where Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years in prison, my third shift at Baphumelele began this past Monday, January 12. And it was hectic one. Two of the volunteers from my previous shift completed their stint at Bap and so headed home over the weekend, leaving only Marta (the Canadian) and me for a few days until we could be joined by two new volunteers later in the week.

We were picked up in Cape Town at 9:30 Monday morning to be driven out to Khayelitsha. In tow, we had our groceries for 3 ½ days (we buy the same thing each shift – lettuce and veggies which can go on our egg sandwiches for breakfast, our ham sandwiches for lunch (turkey does not seem to be something they eat/sell here), and our frozen cheese pizzas for dinner); our linens (which always includes two fitted sheets, for extra protection against bed bugs); and our clothes (which are easy to pack, since I wear the same pair of pants and the same three t-shirts each shift). After we arrived at Bap, we quickly unloaded our groceries, sprayed our mattresses for bed bugs (I have not had any problems yet…but others supposedly have), and headed down to the America House to meet the children as they awoke from their naps.

There are two shifts of care workers in the America House, a day and an evening shift. The day shift during the week will work the full weekend then rotate into the night shift the following week; then, the night shift during the week will have the weekend off. There is a huge personality difference between the two shifts, and this week the day shift on duty, led by a woman named “Princess,” was the much more difficult one. This group of care workers yells a lot at, and sometimes hits or pinches, the children, for which we report them; they bark orders at us all day long, most of which are in Xhosa, so we cannot understand them; and they generally work against us. For instance, they once randomly started giving the children bread and peanut butter during our morning teethbrushing.

After all forty children arose from their morning naps, we prepared and handed out snacks – cheese and apples we brought with us. Although not obligated, if we did not bring them, the snacks they would receive each morning and afternoon would be the same thing, an almost-stale chunk of bread with peanut butter or jam. As we walked out from the kitchen with the food, the children immediately raced towards us, clawing at our legs, with hands outstretched, crying and yelling over and over, “and me, and me, and me!” This happens each time we bring out food for them. “Hlala phantsi nceda” we said to them, asking them to “sit down please.” The care workers just sat there – seemingly relishing the madness and not offering to calm them for us – and one particularly obstinate one, Hilda, danced around us with her arms outstretched also chanting “and me, and me,” begging for our snack. At the same time, a young autistic boy from one of the Cluster Homes, who is usually left to roam around Bap. unsupervised, flew through the room, squawking like a bird and grabbing at all of their food. By the time we managed to hand out all the snacks, we had 40 wailing children.

After snacks, we decided to get out a water table for their playtime. Most of the toys around Bap. are in bits & pieces – scraps of books, incomplete puzzles, broken crayons, parts of dolls, wheel-less toy cars, etc. A previous volunteer had purchased this water table and some water toys. Although we and the children were soaked to the bones, we were having a good time splashing around with them in the water until a few of the care workers became angry, for reasons we did not understand, and ordered a new, very nice, care worker to bring all of the children inside to the “toilet.”

The “toilet” is a cement-floored diaper-changing, bathing and dressing room. It consists of a changing table, a toilet with a broken seat (and never any toilet paper), a bathtub, and cubbies for all the clothes. The care workers are never that discerning with the clothes they put on the children, short of putting a boy in a dress – on this day, one boy wore a little girl’s frilly pink shirt, a few of the girls had on some boy pants, one girl had on the same dress she wore all last week, one boy wore a sweater (its summer) and one girl had on another girl’s lacey white, long crèche graduation dress. But they could not be cuter!

As the new care worker tried to bring them all inside to the toilet, with our assistance, the other care workers again just sat there and watched. All 40 of the children were thrown into the rather small toilet room and, when I went in to try to help, there were kids screaming, kids in the tub, kids drinking the toilet water, kids without clothes on, kids who had messed themselves, and only one care worker trying to deal with all of them! “I’m going to quit” she said to me. We tried to help her, but are not supposed to be doing anything with the toilet, so moved on to helping prepare the lunch.

On this day, lunch consisted of rice and a fish stew. The smell of the “fish,” mostly fish innards, was noxious and we sifted through it with our hands to pick out bones. For lunch, we set up small plastic tables and chairs for them to eat outside the America House. We pulled up a chair alongside some of the smaller children to help them eat and I sat and fed three of them at once. Even the ones we assisted spilled rice and fish stew all over themselves, the tables and floor. And the ones we did not help came up to us and grabbed at our hair, jumped on our backs, and crawled onto our laps, with their little fish stew hands, begging for our attention as well. So when it was all over, I looked as if I had taken a bath in fish stew.

At 3:00 p.m., after our break, we once again handed out snacks for the children. This time we had sugar cookies and, as always, chaos ensued. Hilda “helped” us out a bit more by grabbing an old tennis racquet and swinging it around at all the children to get them to quiet and sit down. A little later, it was equally crazy when we pulled out balloons. All the older children from Clemens House appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and grabbed away the balloons, popping many of them in doing so. You can only imagine the noise of crying children, laughing teenagers, yelling care workers, and popping balloons! The Clemens House children come down to the America House whenever they please, and many of the teenage girls come to play and feed the young ones as if “playing house.” We have no control over them either! Then, while I held one little girl, I noticed a strong stench becoming worse and worse. I looked down to see that my pant leg, where she had been sitting, was now covered in mustard-colored poop. I had to beg a care worker to drop what she was then doing to take this little girl back to the “toilet” and clean her up.

We started preparing the dinner at 5:00 – more rice, with chicken stew. All of the children have very bloated little stomachs, which we think results from all of the rice and bread they eat. At dinner, the care workers wanted them to sit on the floor inside. With barely any room, we literally stepped over, sometimes on, the children as we handed out their bowls and tried to make room to sit on the floor in order to feed them. By the time dinner was over, there was no floor to be seen, only rice and stew. Then, it was might favorite time of the day again…teethbrushing!!! I’ll let the pictures here speak for themselves!

All in all though, despite how dirty I was at the end, it was a great day at Bap. As we arrived at 7:00 a.m. the next morning to begin it all over again, the nighttime shift, before they left for the day, had a drum out. As one kept a beat, the others danced in a circle around the room with the children, singing and chanting at the top of their lungs. We grabbed some children as well and joined in. It has been a great experience so far!

(Pictured: Marta trying to peel them off the window in the medical room so we can brush teeth; me brushing Patience's teeth; Patience drinking water, or should I say pouring it on herself; Vuyani quickly grabbing the "spit bucket" and drinking it before we could take it away!). 

More about Baphumelele

“Baphumelele” in Xhosa means “progress,” which is what Rosalie Mashale hoped it would bring to the community of Khayelitsha. In 1989, Rosie, who had just moved from the Eastern Cape of South Africa to Khayelitsha, witnessed unsupervised young children rummaging through garbage searching for food while their parents worked. Rosie decided to take the children into her home during the day and by the end of the first week, had 36 children there. Thus, began her crèche, Baphumelele, a day care for infants and toddlers. The crèche part of Baphumelele now has about 230 children aged 3 ½ to 6 years, about 20 of which live at the Baphumelele Children’s Home, where I currently volunteer. Last week Baphumelele launched a great new website (www.baphumelele.org.za); the pictures of the children you see on it are ones with whom I am currently working.

Baphumelele has grown from that original crèche in Rosie’s home to encompass a full block in Khayelitsha. It includes the Children’s Home which houses children in two buildings, the “America House” with approximately 40 children from infants to toddlers and the “Clemens House” with another approximately 40 children from aged 6 to 19 years. The children who arrive here are orphaned, abandoned and/or abused. The Children’s Home is the only orphanage in Khayelitsha for children over the age of 8 years, and the children live under very cramped conditions. In the America House, two rooms have cribs lined-up along each wall and, in a third room there, the older toddlers sleep on foam mattresses, body next to body. In Clemens House, the boys sleep in bunk beds jammed into small rooms on the first floor and the girls sleep on the second floor. Each house employs two shifts of full-time care workers, a day shift and evening shift that rotates, who care for the children 24 hours a day.

Just recently, Elton John’s AIDs Foundation donated money for Rosie to build “cluster houses” on the block. There are 4 cluster houses of which one has already been occupied by a family of 5 children and a full-time careworker. The idea with the cluster houses, small single family homes, is to try to keep families together in a real home-like environment. For instance, they eat their meals at the cluster home rather than go to the dining room located in another building, under the volunteer suite, on the block.

Also, Baphumelele has several community-based projects, a theme very important to the vision of Rosie and to the Xhosa culture. It recently added a wood workshop, where men from the community are employed to make wonderful wooden beach chairs - really, these are some I would put out at any Hamptons home! Rosie also operates a kitchen for community members and a second hand shop, all on one block in Dabula Street, Khayelitsha. And, she is in the process of a building an HIV/AIDs Respite Center across the street from the dining room/volunteer house where she will take in adults suffering from HIV/AIDs who have been ostracized by their own family. So, Rosie has definitely made A LOT of progress in Khayelitsha over the past decade, but I'm sure I don't have to tell you how much more must be done.

Again, see the new website for more information on all of this!

Pictured: Billboard of Rosie at one corner of Dabula Street in Khayelitsha were Baphumelele is located; looking down Dabula Street, the 2nd floor of the pink building is where I and the other volunteers reside; my view of Khayelitsha from the door of the volunteer apartment. 

Lessons Learned

Last weekend (December 2-3), the neighborhood where I live in Cape Town, Observatory, held its annual Obs Festival, a two day festival of outdoor music, food and shops (pictures here taken at Obs Fest). I walked down to it on Saturday night, the day I arrived back from my first shift at Baphumelele, with Duncan, the Scottish guy who does not put solid foods into his body, and Marta, the 19-year old Canadian from my shift at Bap. Like many aspects of Cape Town, at Obs Fest, I felt that I could have been in some funky and multi-racial neighborhood in San Francisco, New York or New Orleans. Bands played on each street corner. Street vendors served sausages, corn on the cob and Castle Lager. Stands sold beaded jewelry and t-shirts with Nelson Mandela’s face outlined in silhouette. Young people with dreadlocks, afros or blonde hair (must be the Dutch origin) milled about. And I had a great time, until…

I walked a half block off of Lower Main Road, where the festival was being held, to use my cell phone. As I stood there dialing, a man ran by and swiped it from my hand. In an instant, he disappeared. Although angry and frustrated, since I just purchased the phone right before I left, I decided that it could have been worse and I would just by a new, cheap cell phone here – something I should have done in the first place. Undeterred, I decided to stay around and listen to a few more bands. A few hours later, about to go home, I reached down to my purse, hanging with the strap across my shoulder in front of my body, unzipped it and pulled out my camera to take another picture. As I did that, I felt a hand reach around me and deftly pulled out my wallet. I quickly turned around to the man behind me – certain he took it – and confronted him. I frisked him, made him pull out his pockets, yelled at him (and, of course, he yelled back), but did not find my wallet.

Fortunately, I had emptied my wallet of all but some cash, my ATM card and NY driver’s license. Unfortunately, I too confidently thought I could monitor my purse well enough and did not take everyone’s advice just to put money in my pocket and carry nothing else. And I was not the only one hit that night: Marta had her camera and wallet taken at a bar, Duncan was pick-pocketed, but caught the guy in the act, and another volunteer had his wallet taken as well. The thieves made out well at Obs Fest!

Sunday was a cold, rainy day in Cape Town, which I spent buying a new cell phone, finding an open money exchanger, etc. Monday, though, was a beautiful day. It is summer here and, while warm, there is always a nice breeze blowing off the Atlantic, making the weather very pleasant. I rode a double-decker bus around Cape Town and visited the South African Museum and the District Six Museum with another Aviva volunteer, Michelle, a 20-year old from Vermont who will soon start working on a nature conservation project outside of Cape Town. After attending the art college in Savannah, Georgia for a year, Michelle decided to move to NYC and work like mad as a nanny during the day and at Magnolia Bakery at night to save money in order to travel the world doing volunteer projects for the next year and a half. After volunteering in South Africa, she will head to India, Nepal, Thailand and so forth. One of her more interesting volunteer stints will be in Nepal where, for a month, she will live with Buddhist monks, teach them English for 4 hours a day and, in return, they will teach her meditation practices.

The District Six Museum in Cape Town is a great, small museum adjacent to the now barren fields of District Six, an area just off the central part of Cape Town. District Six was a vibrant, cohesive, mostly Coloured, community before the 1950s, when the apartheid policies of the Nationalist government kicked-in to high gear. In 1950, the government passed the Group Areas Act, giving them authority to designate later, in 1966, that District Six would be a “white area.” Over the next few years, the government forcibly removed more than 6o,000 people from the homes where they had lived for more than five generations. The homes were bulldozed and the people were scattered along the sandy Cape Flats area southeast of Cape Town. Many of the townships formed at this time, Khayelitsha being one of them. Today, District Six is a wasteland full of overgrown weeds and rubbish. The whites who were supposed to move in refused to do so. The government which is supposed to be giving restitution by building homes and moving people back has taking over 10 years to do so. Like the crime here, District Six serves as a reminder of an ugly blight of a really beautiful city. 

Working with the Children at Baphumelele

Amily, Apiwe, Asanda, Asermahle, Awesipho, Baphiwe, Elvis, Kimi, Kwanele, Leema, Lubabalo, Lukholo, Luthando, Mandoza, Moses, Mesuli, Naledi, Nana, Nenana, Neliswa, Numyama, Nxonxo, Okuhle, Jessica, Patience, Pholile, Phisa, Sange, Shakes, Sinazo, Sinyoyolo, Sipho, Thina, Viwe, Vuyani, Zandile, Zolela…

These are the children that I am working with at the Baphumelele Children’s Home in Khayelitsha, a township of about 1.2 million people located a few kilometers outside of Cape Town. Most of the children are of Xhosa origin, as are the care workers there, as is Nelson Mandela. They speak Xhosa, a language using clicks like the Damara in Namibia. Some of these children are orphans; some have been abandoned or removed from their home due to abuse. Some of these children are HIV positive; some already have AIDs. Most of them have a host of other illnesses, such as one boy with cerebral palsy. All of them need more attention than any of the volunteers and full-time care workers can give them, and it is heartbreaking. I have already fallen in love with them – I would take Nenana (pictured by herself) and Patience (pictured crawling) back to the U.S. with me in a second.

I worked this week at Baphumelele from Wednesday through Saturday morning (November 29 to December 2). It was quite an overwhelming few days, and since I’m still learning a lot about Baphumelele and these children, I’ll start with what is easy to describe for this entry: what the short-term (being 6 weeks to 3 months) volunteers, of which I am one, do at Baphumelele.

My primary role is to assist the full-time care workers with the younger children, about 40 in total, who seem to range in age from 9 months to 4 years old. (We do not know most of their actual birthdays.) All of these children stay in what is called the America House. I am joined on my 3 ½ day shift each week by three other volunteers: a very cool 59-year old retired teacher from Illinois; a 19 year old student from Toronto who is very mature for her age; and a woman in her mid-twenties from the UK. While on shift we live in a loft apartment four doors down from the America House, located above the main kitchen / dining room for the older children at Baphumelele.

We begin each day at 7:00 a.m. at the America House. The full-time care workers have already been up with the children since 4:00 a.m., when they start to bathe them and give them their first bottle for the day or, for the older ones, their breakfast of porridge. We arrive and begin to prepare the bottles for the rest of the day, carefully making sure each child has the correct number of bottles and correct amount of formula and water. We also brush all of their teeth – a real challenge – they love the toothpaste and most just clamp down on the brush, with all their tiny might, and suck all of the toothpaste off. They love it so much that they’ll try to reach for and drink the spit bucket and some of the more wily ones often succeed when we have our hands full with the others!

During all of this time, we try to play or hold as many of them as possible. We simply try to give each of the 40 children at least a few minutes of one-on-one time, at least one brief chance to be picked-up and hugged, each time we are around them – it’s a tragedy that is all we can give them. At 8:30 a.m., all of the crèche (pre-school) aged children walk across the street to the crèche where they will stay until 3:00 p.m. This leaves about 20 toddlers back at the America House for the full day. The volunteers then go back to the apartment to shower, eat breakfast and have a break until 10:00 a.m.

At 10:00 a.m. we go back to the America House and feed the toddlers a snack and play with them until 11:30. For instance, on Thursday we brought out a big water table a previous volunteer had purchased for them and let them all play with water toys. At 11:30 we wash all of their hands (a big deal for them, like the tooth brushing activity) and then head to the main kitchen to grab their lunch to bring back to feed them at the America House. The meals they serve here seem to be the same thing day after day, meal after meal: rice with a chicken or fish stew on top made of a watery tomato base, with tiny slices of potato and carrots mixed in. We sit and help them eat their lunch and then clean the dishes until 1:00 p.m., when we once again go back to our volunteer apartment to have our own lunch and break until 2:30.

Because Khayelitsha is not safe, we can not walk around anywhere, not even around the block in broad daylight. So when we are not on duty, we are confined to our apartment. For that reason also, we have to bring all of our food and water for the three days we work. The volunteer apartment, which has the feeling of a wooden clubhouse one would build in their backyard in the U.S., has a fairly rudimentary kitchen with a refrigerator, microwave, a toaster oven and a few burners. We mostly “cook” toast, cereal and eggs for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, and salads with frozen pizzas or pasta for dinner. I have done more “cooking” here than I did the past 5 years in NYC!

At 2:30, we go back to America House and help the care workers wake the children from their naps. We then feed them another snack and once again play with them and the crèche children who return at 3:00 p.m. At 4:30, we do another hand washing and then go grab the dinner meals – more rice and stew. This time we prepare and feed all 40 children. Afterwards, we brush their teeth again, wash the dishes from dinner and prepare the syringes for the vitamins and medicine to be dispensed the next day. Thankfully, we do not change any diapers or do any cleaning, other than the dishes. Wisely, we do not give out medicine. And, we do not put them to sleep. They try to reserve the more intimate, motherly, activities like changing diapers and putting them to bed for the permanent care workers there. Then, around 6:30 p.m. each day, we finish and, again, lock ourselves in our apartment for the evening. And, that is typical day at Baphumelele for the volunteers. It does not take a lot of brains, and would not be they type of work I could do beyond this month, but these children sure do pull your heart strings!