Today my mom and I went on our first home visit with the young mom’s group. I was really excited to go and see what it would be like, but once we arrived at K2 (one of the centres in Masoyi here- we picked up Linky, the leader of the young mom’s program and Angel, another leader from there) my excitement was slightly dampened. I was wearing a skirt for the first time in months, and my Mzungu shirt, from Uganda. Mzungu means “white person”, or “foreigner” in Luganda, which is what the children yell at you as you drive by, so excited to see you; its kind of a must to get a Mzungu shirt for anyone who visits Uganda!
So anyway, I was wearing it (not for the first time since arriving in South Africa by the way!) and we were sitting in an office, waiting for Linky to be ready to go, when a woman walked in to introduce herself. She stopped, asked me what my shirt meant in Luganda, and then doubled over laughing. It turns out that here in South Africa, “Mzungu” is the name of a horrible chicken disease. What a lovely thing to find out mere seconds before you go out into the community. Forget ever wearing that again while in South Africa!
Apart from that awful realization however, it was a very.. interesting experience! We were supposed to visit six or seven houses, but ended up only seeing two, as the first visit took over an hour, and included taking the young girl to the clinic. She is mentally handicapped, and was raped, which is how she became pregnant. As awful as that is, it is apparently quite a common occurrence here L Her little girl, Gift, is now two and absolutely adorable. They were worried that the mother might be pregnant again though (she doesn’t know), which is why the trip to the clinic came about.
While we were waiting for her test results, my mom and I were left in the van with Gift, who after about five minutes became hysterical with fear, and just sat there screaming for her mom in a different language no matter what we did. Good times. Poor little thing though, she was so scared L (Her mom is not pregnant by the way, false alarm!)
The second house was another sad story; 19 year old Virginia is the mother of a six year old little girl called Bridget. Virginia's parents have died, and so she is now alone with her siblings, and her little daughter. She was raped as well, which is how she became pregnant in the first place, but horrifyingly enough, we found out that little Bridget has also been raped; once when she was only four, and once more recently. You would never think so to see her- she was smiley and precious- but I just felt sick when I heard that. Its so wrong.
As we were leaving I was given a mango, and since I was hungry, I decided to follow Angel’s example, and just eat it, skin and all. It was surprisingly good! I spat out some of the skin, but after a while that took too long, and I ended up just eating quite a bit of the skin as well. TIA!
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