On Blistered Feet

Take the deepest shade of green; Texture it with ochre dust, the infinite curve of a mountain and fields of wild yellow grass; People it with gentleness and little smiles breaking on the shores of unimaginable pain and you will glimpse the Lubombo I know.

One Sunday afternoon after visiting some patients in the communities surrounding the hospital, I decided to take a leisurely drive along the dirt road which extends from Mapuwane to Big Bend. The road is long and littered with jagged rocks and pot holes, but affords stunning panoramic views of Swazilands Lubombo mountains as you descend from Mapuwane to the plains below.

I had not driven more than a kilometre when I noticed an older Swazi woman walking the same road. She had a ten kilo bag of maize meal on her head and neatly wrapped under her arm was what seemed to be a little blanket.

Opening my window I asked in my awkward Siswati “ Make (pronounced Ma-gay: ‘mother’) can I give you a lift?”

Her time sculpted face was etched in brown dignity. Without a word she removed the maize meal from her head, put it in the trunk of my car and with the smallest of smiles we recommenced our journey.

She was a woman of few words. I explained that I was a doctor and that I came each year to work with the people. She told me that her home was just a ‘little way’.

We drove down the steep gravel road, past huts of mud and thatch, some in disrepair from the recent storms. Barefoot toddlers with muddy legs and wild smiles waved and blew kisses from the side of the road as we passed.

After driving for 15 minutes I asked “Is it close Make?”

“Hame Embile” she whispered - Keep going.

So we did. Seemingly suicidal goats weaved in and out of the traffic, mothers and daughters carrying large containers of freshly collected water on the heads for their evening meal.

We came to a sugar plantation and I decided that this must be the place where ‘Make’ stayed. I nodded “ Here?”

“Hamba Embile” came the reply.

We drove through acres of towering green sugar cane. After another half an hour we came to a muddy river. The signage beside it was clear “Beware Hippos and crocodiles”.

I wondered how anyone could walk this far, especially with a 10 kilo bag of maize on their heads.. “Make surely you do not walk this whole way?” I asked incredulously. Is there a bus or koombi that runs here.

“No bus. No koombi.”

“How long does this walk take you?”

She explained to me that she was going to her work place in Big Bend from her home in Mapuwane. She would leave at 2.00 pm and arrive in Big bend at 7.30 pm. 5 hours and thirty minutes.

Then suddenly, without warning, this quiet angel told me the rest of her story.

“Last night I was here in Big bend grinding leaves to sell at market. My eldest daughter who lives next door to me cried out for help. She was in labour and delivered a tiny baby girl, who was struggling to breathe.

We knew we had to get the child to hospital. But there was no bus and I had no money.

It was very dark and cold. We walked next door and borrowed a blanket to keep the baby warm. We started the journey on foot, but our baby died on the way.

She died in my daughters arms as she held her to her breast.

When we reached Mapuwane this morning, we buried the child next to my home.”

I found it difficult to speak. What experience in my priveledged existence could come close to the bitter sorrow that this family was living right now. To carry the body of your own dead child for five and a half hours up a steep mountain side.

The ‘concerned doctor’ in me wanted to do something to help, “Dear Make you have been through so much. But can I ask why are you walking back to Big bend to work today? You are grieving, 5 and a half hours walking is too much when you are carrying this burden of sorrow. Can I drive you back to your homestead so you can be with your daughter?”

“ Dokotella, I am not going to work.” She smiled.

“I am going to return the blanket”

There are moments in life when we are rendered silent. When a human being acts in such a way as to shatter all our preconceived notions of what is possible for the human heart to endure.

Here was a woman in the dark night of her soul, finding the strength to walk five and a half hours to return a little blanket so that anothers child would not be cold.

When I was a little boy I read these words: “ In life as in dance, Grace glides on blistered feet.”

Today I understand them.

In a world where selfishness presides, there are still those so gracious as to break the shoulders of their own sorrow with buds of kindness.

These are my heroes. My teachers. My shining light in the darkness.

Walk on,

Love the world into change,


Maithri.

On difference

Saturday 12th, June
Siteki, Swaziland
0500



Sometimes little words are not enough. Each year as I walk the roads of rural Swaziland meeting those living with terminal AIDS, tuberculosis, endemic disease and extreme poverty, I inevitably come to the realisation that my words form only the most awkward of mirrors upon which the depth and urgency of the needs which are brought before me might be reflected. What I see each day is painted in such vivid tones of soft grace, brokenness and wounded love that the wings of my little words always fall short of holding them.

And yet I will continue to try.

Recently I was in the the community of Ngcina, a place where the green aloe constellates like stars beside the red dust road. In the back seat of our truck were two Swazi nurses whose quiet dignity and persistent gentleness in the face of arid despair teaches all those blessed to be in their presence. And in the drivers seat was my wonderful friend and team mate Kathleen, who embodies the truest meaning of compassion.

You need a truck full of love when you visit the house of sorrow. It clothes you in helpfulness; it allows you to be useful.

That day in Ngcina, after seeing many patients with end stage HIV and sick orphaned children, we came upon a little one bedroom home made of cement.

Lying on a mattress inside was a man covered in a blanket.

“Sawubona” He greeted us softly.

This man had stage four HIV, terminal AIDS and had not walked in many months because of nerve damage caused by the virus. I asked if I could look at his legs and so drew back the blanket covering him.

No one could have expected what we found.

His legs were covered from thigh to toe, in deep, long ulcers. Ulcers which had eaten through skin, soft tissue and even muscle.

What was more these ulcers were suppratively infected with what was immediately recognisable as pseudomonas aeruginosa. Thick bright yellow pus poured like honey from his wounds; His bed awash in oozing sickness. The smell was so powerful that it took all within me just to put on my gloves and examine his legs further. We lifted up one leg and found that his heels were covered in cavitating lesions which were eating into his ankle joints. He had no dressings to put on his wounds, so he had used newspaper, which had now adhered itself to his legs.

I cannot imagine what it is like to go to sleep at night with a bed covered in wet infected pus. To be unable to get up and clean yourself. To endure the pain of knowing that every day the infection is moving further up your body and being completely unable to assist yourself.

We cleaned his wounds, dressed them as well as we could. Gave him medications and organised for him to come to hospital for immediate surgical debridment and intravenous antibiotics.

As I looked around the walls of his cement home I saw a photo hanging on the wall positioned directly at the foot of his bed.

“Who is that?” I asked.

“My daughter Dokotella” he responded.

“She is beautiful” I said with a smile.

“Yes, I love her.” He whispered. “ I keep it there because when I see her face it makes the pain go away for a moment.”


When we hear stories of Africa or the developing world, we hear of diseases and poverty of such unimaginable quality and texture that it almost seems ‘unreal’. So we create for ourselves a ‘third world’, and shelter our minds from the realities which other human beings face on a daily basis.

And yet what I want to tell you is that in this cement house in Ngcina Swaziland, There resides more than another third world victim of HIV.

There is a man, a good man, who loves his children. A man who has known wild laughter and soft joy. Someone who in the height of his sorrow looks upon the face of his daughter to find a breath of hope and courage.

We are not as different as we seem.

When we truly realise this, when we allow the river of understanding to wind its way into the farthest reaches of our being, nothing can ever be the same.

Love the world into change,

Maithri

On the importance of nests

Sunday, 6 June 2010

08:00

It is nesting time in Siteki and a host of little brown eyed birds have descended upon the field of grass growing outside my window. Each earnest parent tenderly picks a sallow complected stalk, often twice their own size, and takes it back to furnish the modest home which they are building.

A nest is the ensign of the family. There we are nurtured and nourished; Given roots and wings.

Yet in so many parts of Swaziland, human nests are fractured and fissured.

Recently I was visiting the little community of Makhewu with some of my team members when we found a lonely 3 year old child wandering among the homesteads.

His clothes were muddied and brown; his eyes wide with fear.

A little further investigation revealed that he was the youngest of three children. Their father had died of AIDS last year leaving their pregnant twenty year old mother to raise them on their own. The family live in a one room hut made of mud and thatch. Each morning their mother goes to work and the elder siblings leave for school. The three year old boy is left at home with a little food and a plaintiff request that a neighbour looks in on him from time to time.

There is almost a hallmark quietude which emanates from a deeply frightened child. They reach into themselves and put on whatever armour they can to protect themselves from fear and pain. We saw it so vividly in this little one. Even the slender grass that towered above him seemed stronger, more resilient than he did.

At an emergency meeting with the childs mother, we spoke at length about our deep concerns for this childs safety and the dangers of leaving him alone.

Her response was heartfelt: “What do I do Dokotella? My husband has died. I am pregnant. I have to work and the children have to go to school. I love my children. But I don’t know what else I can do?”

It would be convenient if problem solving was a linear process. If A plus B always equalled C. But in Swaziland that is rarely the case. The blame game gets us nowhere. In truth, supporting this child means supporting his mother and helping her to become truly independent in the context of her socioeconomic and cultural situation.

In a country where there is a deep scarcity of social services, we need to do more than just provide food assistance or medical care to truly empower this family. We need to engage their social network allowing the Makhewu community itself to become a nest for this child and his family.

And what about those of us who do not live in Makhewu or Siteki, Dafur or Delhi. Do we have any responsibility? I would contend that we have more than a responsibility; we have a singular, shining opportunity. A chance to adamantly refuse to choose the path of indifference to pain; To inform ourselves of the crises facing children and to change the paradigm, the lens through which we see this wounded world. As we become champions for those whom we have not met, but to whom we feel connected, we affirm the common humanity that runs like blood through the veins of this world.

We stir hope from its sleeping place and breathe vibrant life into the dormant seeds of change.

It matters not, whose child walks the paths of Makhewu alone. What matters is that they are seen and found; Nested in the love of true community.

Given roots and wings.

From Siteki with love,

Maithri

On Hope

Saturday June 5th

Siteki, Swaziland
0530


Gogo Ida Gama turns seventy this year. Her house, made of mud, is falling down.

When it rains or the withering southern wind begins to blow, the wall above her bed, shifts and crumbles.

She can barely walk. She has no food. She is always cold.

In her lifetime, Gogo has seen more than her share of suffering. All but one of her children have died before her, as a consequence of HIV/AIDS. Her only remaining daughter is also HIV positive and has just given birth to a newborn to go with her other little 3 year old piece of heaven named ‘Nothando’ – which means ‘Love’.

The mud hut where the children sleep is also in disrepair. There are holes in the walls through which intruders like snakes and rats find their way to threaten the children as they sleep.
Our team at Possible Dreams, met Gogo, as the sun was setting one cold Swazi evening. She talked in tones of quiet despair of her trials and little dreams for her family; That they might have food enough for the days ahead; That they might find some portion of shelter from the storms that raged around them.

We gathered together Gogo’s community, our PDI builders, some of whom are also orphans of AIDS, and we set about building her a house.

Yesterday when we visited Gogo, a sublime sense of hope burned like the sun around her. The fragrance of new life was everywhere apparent.

The house is almost complete. It has strong walls and floors; A corrugated iron roof; Windows and doors are on the way... Even a verandah. These are things which mostof us take for granted, but for so many living in Swaziland, they are luxuries which they will simply never experience in their lifetime.
Last month we commenced Gogo’s family on our ‘mealie meal project’ which offers emergency food assistance to families of orphans or Gogo families who are in desperate need of food. Each month she will receive 25 kg of mealie meal (a porridge based meal which is the staple of the Swazi diet), 60 eggs, sugar and beans as a supplement to her diet.

As we were about to leave Gogo Gama’s homestead last night, I heard shouting.

It was Gogo, and she just received her latest parcel of food from Possible Dreams International.

As we watched, she started waving her hands and singing. She even began to slowly rock her largely immobile legs from side to side. Dancing. In her way.

Tears came. Streams of joy flowing down cheeks forged by the fires of life.

She said in Siswati. “Last night every morsel of food that we have, was finished. Now the children can eat. “

I bowed my head and cried.

Sometimes it seems that the problems of this world loom over us like deep unshakeable shadows. But the reality is that in the face of even the most unimaginable despair, hope can find a way.

All we have to do is open a door for her. Build her a house. Make space for her to breathe.

Love the world into change,

We can,
Maithri.

On Presence

Thursday 3rd May

0600
Siteki, Swaziland.


We underestimate presence.

The last 24 hours of plane flight and bustling airport terminals have been a keen reminder.

I would be one of the first to sing the praises of the cellular phone for its singular ability to connect people across the world, but as I sat in a Melbourne airport lounge last evening in the company of a hundred kindred travellers, there was a distinct feeling of disconnect. Walled within a series of discrete, invisible cocoons each of us sat, in quiet adoration of the phone in our hand; deftly insulated and conveniently protected from the ‘strangers’ milling around us.

As I stepped out of the arrivals gate of Matsapha airport, onto Swazi soil once more. The cocoon began to lift.

We pay lipservice to the manifest separateness which pervades our communities. Even when it violently rears its head in the form of psychological and emotional pathology, we brush it off as merely a symptom of the age, a byproduct of progress.

The dichotomy of the work in which I am engaged and my consistent experience of working in places of extreme material poverty, is that a concomitant and almost counter-intuitive spiritual wealth is so frequent as to be the norm in many of these places.

I am aware of not allowing the arch of my words to sweep too broadly in this matter, there are always exceptions and to say that a wealth of spirit is often the heirloom of impoverished communities around our world does not even for a moment trivialise the immediacy or the devastation caused by abject material poverty.

But the fact remains that each day that I walk the dusty roads of Swaziland I meet millionaires in spirit clothed as the humble poor.

Presence is more than physical. There is an invisible exchange that occurs in the spaces between us which even the most brilliant scientist would have difficulty articulating.

Healing so often occurs in our least medicated moments. In soft glances and shared laughter. There is a nutritive power in being truly listened to, a womb like comfort which comes from being heard and seen deeply.

I know there are many medical professionals who cringe at this kind of discourse. But perhaps that is merely because we have been taught to value ‘the seen’, the quantifiable, the tangible and discount ‘the rest’ as inconsequential.

I would like to see us speak of presence as an art form. An instrument of empowerment.

When we allow the barriers to fall away for even the most cursory of moments and create a genuine intimacy between ourselves and another human being, that which is stagnant in us is released into flow and dynamism. In the warm embrace of human connection, we are reminded of our own potentiality and power; liberated into fearless understanding.

As I go out into the communities this morning to visit those living with AIDS, malnutrition and extreme poverty, my wish is to be fully and vibrantly present. To create soft spaces where the song of a wounded world might enter the wounded places of my own heart; and that somewhere within that communion of presence, the river of healing might flow.

From Siteki with love,

Maithri

Till every shackle falls....

20th May 2010

7pm, Melbourne

Australia

I still remember the warmth of the rain on my skin as I waited for my taxi. I had just finished a stint as a medical registrar in one of the larger Queensland hospitals and that day I was flying home to a little relaxation and the shade of southern skies.

As the white taxi pulled into the kerb, I watched the driver emerge and greet me. There was an uncommon softness laughing in her eyes; A vibrant goodness that startled and warmed me. The drive to the airport lasted only the briefest of minutes but in those few moments a friendship was born.

I told her of Swaziland. Of motherless children in roofless huts who taught me more than spectacled professors ever had; Angels dressed in raiments of AIDS and malnutrition, whose wings were thank you's and gentle lessons of grace.

And she shared with me her story. How after longs hours of work, driving weary travellers around the streets of Cairns, she would return home and sew quilts for the orphans of India. Patches of hope, threads of tenderness woven together in her own unique, laughing way . She went each year. Quietly; Humbly and without ceremony. To share a simple love and wide eyed joys with her new found friends in the slums.

As we pulled into an airport awash in rain, I shared with her my crazy philosophy.... "It matters.... All of it."

"Humanity is a spiders web. Touch it at its most forgotten point and the whole web vibrates."

I remember the two rainbows that rode the sky that morning as I walked from that black and white taxi last year. I remember the smile that i couldn't wipe from my face; and the certain knowledge that the world was one.

Tomorrow I turn another day, another year, another decade older.

I turn my head over the shoulders of my life and all I see is grace; wild and deep; constellating like a million shining points of light around me.

My only wish is to keep on returning that which has been given to me. To walk each step in gratefulness and to remember that those of us who truly believe in freedom, must not fail to keep on touching fingers of kindness upon the web of life.... Till every shackle falls.

Love the world into change,

Maithri

PS I am returning to Swaziland in the coming days,

Walk with me.