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.