Highs and Lows

Though Liz receives rave reviews about her writing, it was time for me to finally chime in with a post. Here it goes...

As the title of this post indicates, this has been a week of highs and lows. If you read our last blog posting, you know that we have been volunteering in the Maramba Community this past week. We have been helping the palliative care workers and offering whatever comfort, encouragement, or help we can muster.

On Thursday morning we travelled to "Zone E." This Zone is the furthest distance away from the Maramba Clinic and has the least resources available to treat patients. There is only one ambulance to serve the entire city of Livingstone (population 100,000). The ambulance rarely, if ever, makes trips to Zone E.

After a 1/2 hour walk to get to the Zone, we visited about 8 homes and encountered the most harrowing situations we have seen in our time in Africa. For example, we visited an HIV positive mother and her HIV positive 2 year old baby. Both mother and child were without Anti-retroviral medications because they could not make it to the clinic. Both seemed to be on the brink.

We also visited a 14 year old HIV positive girl who was pregnant and had been slashed in the mouth with a knife by her 16 year old husband (it almost sounds unreal just writing the story).

On our way out of Zone E, we encountered a 6 year old girl sitting on the ground by herself with a piece of fabric covering her legs. She could not walk, so we asked to see her legs. She hesitantly removed the fabric to reveal a severe infection on her lower left leg that had gone down to the bone and rendered her unable to walk. Her mother was working and had left her alone. This was truly shocking to all of us. Along with the caretakers, we carried the child halfway to the clinic and then took her in a taxi the rest of the way. As we walked, to strangers from the community, a man and a woman, volunteered to carry the girl on their backs to get her to the clinic. After being disheartened that the mother was nowhere to be found, we were amazed by the compassion of other people in the community. She made it to the clinic and is hopefully just finishing up her prescribed penicillin treatments tomorrow.

After thursday morning, we were beat, but we knew we had the weekend to look forward to.

On Saturday, we woke up early for a day trip to Botswana. We visited Chobe National Park for a daylong safari. Chobe Park is 11,000 square kilometers. We started the morning with a 3 hour Chobe River cruise. On the cruise, we were flanked by land on the left and an island to the right. Many animals flock to the island to drink water because this is the dry season. Some of the highlights of the cruise were a group of 40 hippos, being within a meter of a crocodile, watching about 150 (yes.....150!!!) elephants cross the river to then go in a mudbath. In the boat, we were able to get very close to all the animals.

On the afternoon safari in an open air truck, we saw a "pride" of 8 lions feasting on something that had been alive shortly before we got there. We saw a herd of probably 500 buffalo migrating in front of our truck. We saw many more elephants that were within 20 feet of us. A little scary to say the least. We came close to giraffes, but they spook easily and were not easily photographed.

Words do not describe what we saw properly, so we look forward to showing you the pictures if you want to see them.

This week we are back at the Clinic in the morning. Liz saw a baby being born last week and was the first one to hold him. Maybe it was birthday luck! (Men are not allowed in the room so I just get to hear about it). We will post again asap.

Miss you all!