swazi update #4

Dearest Friends and Family,

It's been awhile since I last wrote, but I have been incredibly busy with work the last few weeks and have been put in two 14-hour days so far this week alone. Today it looks like I may be only working ten hours and I am so excited just to have a moment to breath!

In this letter I thought I would try something new. So far in my letters I have mainly focused on writing about all the wonderful adventures I am having here, and I have tried to convey the joy I am experiencing in my everyday life (I still absolutely love it here! ~). However, I don't want the point of why I am here to somehow get lost in those messages. I am here to serve in this beautiful ministry, and so I thought I would share the things I have been seeing in my daily life which show me why this work is so incredibly important. My worldview is being shaken on a daily basis and I thought that as these are the things on my heart I would share them, so that you also might have a better understanding of why Bulembu exists and why the work here is so crucial to this next generation of Swazi's. I want you to understand the things that are shaking my worldview, and the things I am seeing everyday so that you can understand that in spite of the joy I am experiencing here, that my heart is also bleeding, so that you can understand how your support is helping.

Now many of you know from my previous letters that Swaziland has the highest rate of HIV/AIDS in the world, and alongside that it has the highest rate of orphans and vulnerable children of any country in the world. While we may think we understand that in theory, I think I personally failed to understand what that meant outside of a first world context, and why this makes Bulembu's work so important.

I want to walk you through what I have come to understand this to mean:

Swaziland has one of the highest rates of incest and rape in the world, most rapes remain unrecorded particularly when they are incestuous as the sense of shame for a woman in Swaziland is very high. In a place where more then half of the children are orphans or have parents who abandon them or cannot look after them, this leaves the children vulnerable to sexual abuse and rape, and sadly this is exactly what happens to most of these children. The vast majority of young women have a child before they are 16 years old as a result of rape. This week Jacaranda, one of the smaller sister programs in Bulembu, got a new young girl who is 12 years old. She had been raped three times in the last month alone and is extremely traumatized. Unfortunately because we only have one social worker that works for Bulembu and we have so many children like this, it will probably be quite awhile before her issues will be addressed in any meaningful way. Although we are doing all we can (our caregivers have received some training about how to deal with childhood trauma cases) and we are looking for a child psychologist and a social worker to come join our team it is extremely painful to watch this little girl go through so much trauma. Bulembu is the first safe place she has ever experienced in her life and it will probably take her quite some time before she understands what this means.

You are probably asking why social welfare Swaziland doesn't provide some kind of counseling service after they have placed a child in our care, or doesn't do more to protect the children of Swaziland. While the social welfare of Swaziland knows this is happening they can only afford to employ between 20-40 social workers in total, and they only have one vehicle between all of them. This means each social worker in Swaziland would approximately have over 4000 cases to investigate and follow up on, and no means of getting from child to child. Before a child can be removed from a dangerous situation the child's history and home life must be thoroughly investigated (yes even in Swaziland!) over a number of months, but as the welfare workers do not even have the ability presently to get to the location where the child is to investigate, the chances of a child actually being removed from the situation are very slim. If a social worker does actually manage to get to the location where a child is and discovers that it is in fact unfit, there is no safe place for them to move the children to while they are finding a more permanent place for them. So even if a social worker is aware that a child is in an extremely unfit home where they are experiencing severe abuse they cannot do anything about it until they can find a permanent place for the child, but there are so many orphans and vulnerable children in Swaziland that most orphan homes are full.

There are so many orphans and vulnerable children in Swaziland at the moment that the majority of homes for orphans are overflowing, neighbors and kin are loaded with children that are not even theirs. There are so many children without parents that social welfare Swaziland considers child headed households to be a reasonable option as a place to place orphans or vulnerable children. Bulembu is
important because it is one of the few orphan care programs in Swaziland that is still accepting children with open arms, and providing for more then their minimum needs. We are also one of the very few that provides for the needs of the children in a holistic way and strives to give them a beautiful future.

My worldview was shaken when today a lady walked into the office with her son, and she asked us to take him. She was HIV positive and she did not think she would live much longer. She had no place to go as her family had thrown her out of her homestead, the child had no father, and the woman was unemployed. She had borrowed all the money she could in the world to take the bus 2 hours to Bulembu because she heard it was the best child care program in Bulembu. Unfortunately we cannot just take the child as social welfare must first investigate (it would be illegal for us to just take him), so we bought the woman food and gave her money to send her back on the bus, we also arranged social welfare to meet with her. However, the deep tragedy is that because it will likely take child welfare so long to investigate the case, it is likely that the mother may give up and kill her own child before an intervention takes place. This is something that happens a lot here in Swaziland, which once again is why programs like ours are so important.

I cannot emphasize enough why what we are doing here is so important. We drive social workers from social welfare Swaziland workers to investigate their worst cases, because we want to provide a safe home for children. We take these children and we give them a home that is safe and where all their needs will be met in abundance. We provide them with counseling and a safe place to talk about the things that have happened to them, and we help them to move forward and show them they can have a future free from the pain they have experienced. We run a clinic where we provide for all their children's medical needs 24 hours a day (I know this for a fact because my best friend here is the town doctor/medic and he never sleeps as he is always looking after children and villagers!). We feed the children healthy nutritious meals, and for most of the children this is the first time they have received three meals a day in their lives. We clothe them and give them shoes for the first time, we had a boy who came a couple months ago who had never even seen underwear in his life before coming here, and he was 13 years old! We run a school for them, in order to provide them with first class education so that they can go to receive further education after graduation. We run after school programs and have sports teams and clubs for them, so that they have a chance to
play and learn teamwork, and just be children for the first time in their lives. We run a church and church programs, so that they can see that it is not us that is providing for them but it is God in his goodness who looks after them. We teach them about the importance of being healthy in soul, mind, and body. We run industries in the community so that when they grow up they will have a place to work, and a future to look forward to. Bulembu is so important because without a place like it for orphans and vulnerable children to go, the children will continue to be abused, will continue to be raped, will continue to contract HIV, and will continue to die or be killed by their parents without anyone ever having noticed... and that is not being dramatic, it is simply a fact. But because of Bulembu 200+ kids have been rescued from that, and thousands upon thousands more will have the chance to escape that life and be given a chance to dream about a future for the first time in their lives.

My job is such a small part of what we do here and yet without this job and others like it we wouldn't be able to do what we do for the children of Bulembu. At the end of this week I will have worked over 60 hours, but I am so happy to do it because when I walk out the door of the office at the end of the evening and pass children who are laughing and playing and just being kids I know it's worth it. I do what I do for love of them. However, I would not be able to do what I do without you; without your prayers and support. I just want to say thank you so much for being part of what is happening in Bulembu. I am the lucky one because at the end of the day I get to see the looks on the children's faces, but you are just as responsible as I am for the change that is happening here....

Anyways those are my thoughts for the day, I hope they expressed the gratitude I am feeling for your support, and at the same time helped you see the reality of what is happening here in Swaziland.

I have also been having many other wonderful experiences in Swaziland, everything from hiking the mountains to learning the Swazi traditional dance. I am actually even attending the Marula festival tomorrow to represent Bulembu and dance for the King (hopefully he does not decide to make me his 15th wife), and I am incredibly excited! I am more in love with the Swazi culture, and southern Africa then ever before. I truly think I might never come home!

On a brief more personal level a lot has happened over the last month at home - a friend passed away due to cancer, my grandfather went into the hospital and is not expected to come out, my mom discovered she had skin cancer, and another best friend thinks her cancer may be back... so it's been a bit rocky, and my family and friend could definitely use some prayer. In particular I deeply ask you to pray for my grandparents as they go through this difficult time. I wish I could be with them so much. However, I have never for a second wanted to be anywhere other than where I am right now. I know that God is looking after my family as I do what I can to look after the Bulembu family! But please, if you think of us please keep my family in your prayer.

Other than that I hope this letter finds you incredibly well! I am praying for special blessings for all of you and I really hope that you all are having fun in the Olympic season (I wish I was there!)

I am sending you all tons of love!

Blessings,

Heather

ps Happy Valentines day! I send my love!

Heather Davies