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!).