Well, our debrief and training is over now. Some teams have already left for their next ministry sight. Our team will be leaving tomorrow monrning to head back to South Africa. We will be working with three of the new teams doing kids camps.
Some of us took a last minute venture into rural Swaziland today to spend time at one of the care points. There are no orphanages here, because if the kids left their land they would loose it. Instead, there are Care Points set up where the kids can come to get food and be taken care of during the day. At night, they return either to relatives or to their families property.
Many of the “older” kids care for the younger ones by themselves. Kids begin filling this parenting role even by age 5. As soon as they can walk they are given responsabilities. It is not unusual for a 5 year old to take full responsability for caring for younger siblings during the day. Kids as young as 10 may be the only “adults” in the household.
Another solution is providing homes for the kids to live in. It would be similar to a foster home, with 5-10 kids living with one family, but it is a long term arrangement until they can work and live on their own. It is hard for us to imagine that kind of responsability. Most Americans in their twenties wouldn’t be able to do that.
I noticed as we were driving down the street that the people look pretty normal. You would never know that almost 50% of the population is HIV posative. Even at the Care Point, it is hard to look at the kids and realize that most of them have no parents, and some have no living relatives at all. It is hard to look at the girls and understand that many of them have been raped, or the boys and know that some of them are rapists. Everybody looks so normal. We just can’t understand that.
