Home Visits And Toy Guns

The past two weeks volunteering have been great. I’ve continued to help the Healthy Mom & Baby Clinic staff with the government measles vaccination campaign here in J-Bay. There has recently been an increase in adult measles cases in South Africa so the government began a campaign to boost all children under fifteen with a third vaccine dose. Yesterday we finished the last school visit to administer the vaccine. I think we’ve vaccinated around one thousand children in the past two weeks!

I also had the privilege yesterday of seeing another part of the work done by the Health Mom & Baby Clinic by tagging along on home visits in the township areas. The clinic staff do home visits for all newborns in the area, checking in to see how mom & baby are doing. The moms are given a little gift bag with some clothing, a toy and soap. The staff also weigh the babies and talk to the mothers about care, nutrition, depression etc and will pray for them and provide other support or referrals as needed. The clinic has been struggling with funding for the gift bags they bring (specifically the cost of bags and soap) and a lot of the clothing given is second-hand donations. I spent a day earlier this week scrubbing baby clothes by hand with another girl to try to get out some of the formula and spit up stains. I’m not sure we were too successful, but we did what we could. These mothers will appreciate any clothing we can give, however it is an aim of the clinic to give them a nice new gift and make them feel special.

So, I went on three home visits. The first one was to a township called Oceanview. Don’t let the name fool you… this is nowhere to call home. This township is full of violence (one murder per week), abuse, rape and many problems. The people here are some of the most impoverished in the area and are lucky to have a tin roof over their heads. Many ‘homes’ are constructed of scrap metal and have no electricity or running water. Even the government built homes constructed of concrete don’t have indoor plumbing. We pulled up to the first home for our visit and discovered that the baby had already died (not sure of the reason). The mother was carrying around a toy gun (looked real..) for some reason and didn’t want to chat with us. She was given an open invitation to the clinic for counseling or support, but who knows if she will take that opportunity. The other two home visits were in Tokyo Sexwale (yes that is the name! sounds like tok-y-o sec-wall-eh). The people in this township are doing better than those in Oceanview and they generally have a bit better homes and facilities and a bit less violence. The two mothers we visited were doing well by township standards. They both had husbands and a few other children and lived in concrete homes that were hospitable. Their babies were doing alright as well and I got to hold them both, so cute! They were very appreciative of the gifts and we invited them back to the clinic for weekly baby weigh-ins and any other support they might need.

In addition to the volunteering, I am super busy with church and life... time at the beach... sunrises over Supertubes... braais (bbq) with friends... pizza night on tuesday... touch rugby on the beach sunday afternoon.... baking banana bread last night... movie night tonight... you get the idea. Oh, and I went to Addo Elephant Park again this past tuesday, saw more elephants and animals, then went to a lion ranch afterwards (held a two month old lion!). Still mega blessed here.


Vaccination Team




Supertubes







Addo Elephant Park & Addo Lion Ranch