Take your shoes off and step on the scale please...

Today we spent the day helping the nursing staff from Tapologo do medical assessments on about 60 children. It was by far the most enjoyable day I have had here thus far yet also the most tiring. Out of the door by 7am we headed to Boitekong, an out of town residential area that is also built around a Platinum mine. The lady who runs the centre there, Lebo had her daughter with her and it was hilarious watching her sneakily wipe her boogers off her moms shirt while she was turned away...lol. Many of the children that are registered into the OVC Programme at Boitekong are HIV positive and those that had yet to be tested had their blood drawn today as a 'Rapid (HIV) Test' was performed. Among the beaming faces of those children that had come out early to get their physicals, there were those that cried at the very site of any type of medical equipment and those that would do anything to have us take a photograph of them. Lily and I were in charge of weight and height measurements to make sure that the children were developing normally, after the initial assessment we did, they were then sent on to the professional nursing staff who examined their reflexes, lymph nodes, blood pressure and all that other good stuff.
Although to many of the children, the only words we exchanged were "could you take your shoes off and step on the scale please" (in setswana of course) this is the one day that we have had the most interaction with the people of Rustenburg, both young and old. After a week of being in a back room cleaning out the closet or organizing books, today felt like a breath of something new, people...finally!
We took many pictures of both us and the children, and while trying to put on our most professional looking 'medical poses' we couldn't help but laugh at the little boy who came up every so often to ask us to take a picture of him, and would still hold the same pose he did for the last 5. It was a very tiring day but I hold on to the hope that we'll have many more just like this one.

One week on..

It seems like we have been here for a lot longer than the 7 days that it has been, Rustenburg has begun to etch itself into our brains as we learn to find our way around after being lost everyday this last week. It has been a busy days work at Neobirth and after having cleaned out their outlet store and organized the clothes donated for pregnant mothers, I began to think about why I decided to take up this venture. This past week Lily and I have spent organizing books for the childrens library at Freedom Park, a mining residential area of low cost housing and corrugated iron shacks. With the tasks few and far between we have taken to doing routine and laborious work like washing dishes and mopping the floor just to have something to do. So after 4 days spent at Freedom Park and the days work at Neobirth, with the load weighing heavy on my shoulders and spreading its ache across my muscles I began to think back to why Lily and I decided to come to Rustenburg, South Africa in the first place.
With a fire in our hearts and a will to do some good in the world we left the comforts of Schenectady and crossed the Atlantic. With rose-coloured glasses I told myself I wanted to make some sort of change in the lives of the people I'd be working with. I wasn't as ambitious as to say I wanted to the change the world (I'll do that later) but change one persons world atleast. The first day we arrived at Tapologo we were given a tour of the center, the In-Patient Unit and Lab. We met the staff and the familiar excitement that had been diluted by the hard work of planning this independent study began to return. We went to Freedom Park that very first day, met the amazing women at the center who run the after-school care programme for the children and went home eagerly awaiting the next day.
We began sorting through hundreds of books that were gathering dust in the store-room and even had some children come in to help us transport them into the newly formed library. We tried setting up computers that had been donated to the center as well, probably the oldest computer models known to man-kind, but were set to fail, not only because of how old they were but because of the many missing parts as well.
I may not feel like I am changing any lives but I've seen the joy in the faces of those children that ran into their new library, grabbed a book and all gathered around it to read together. I've seen appreciation in the face of the old man who told me about his long struggle with TB, how he wishes to get better so he can get back to working in the mine and who insisted that after every sentence, I reiterate his story to Lily in english. I may not feel like I am changing any lives but I am making some sort of difference...we'll see what this week has to offer.