Hi everyone!
I want to first apologize for my lack of blogs. Internet in Africa is scarce, but I'm in Asia now so I anticipate being able to blog more frequently.
This past month I was in Swaziland working alongside AIM’s staff at various care points. Swaziland is a small country, the size of New Jersey, and is bordered entirely by South Africa. Care points are small houses with a kitchen and an extra room or two. These care points are a place for impoverished and or orphaned children to come and receive a meal everyday. Go-go’s cook the meals. Go-go’s are women who have volunteered themselves to providing for these children. There are vegetable gardens that we were able to harvest the past couple days in order to provide food for the Go-go’s to use for the kids. I can’t wait to have a garden of my own!
A a couple weeks ago my new teammates Mary, Katie and I walked to one of the care points to spend time with the kids while they ate. As they waited for their meals they played with my hair and wrote their names on the palm of my hand and mine in theirs. They asked me how many boyfriends I had. I told them zero.
What most people don’t know is Swaziland is dying. It’s determined that by the year 2050 the population will have died off due to HIV. There are poster boards alongside the highways that encourage its citizens to pick one person. These signs tell people to create friction with their culture to be tested and abstain.
One of the girls at the care point told me she had five boyfriends, I hoped she was mostly joking and just trying to get a reaction out of me. I think the girls expected me to say that I had at least one. I thought I’d become unpopular real quick, but they just stared at me. I said I just wanted to find one man to share my life with and that they should wait for someone they love and do the same.
Most of the girls I spoke with have at minimum one person in their family who has HIV, some of them have it themselves. Many of them have been raped and are victim of circumstance. I don’t know if there is any greater injustice than a person having to suffer the consequences of someone else’s actions.
I can’t imagine living a life trapped by my own body. I don’t want to.
I don’t’ know if those girls will think about our conversation ever again, but I hope they do.
I hope that when I’m in my sixties that I’ll hear that Swaziland is still there and at that point thriving.
