Social Work

I've gone out with the social work team at Themba Care twice now. It has been an experience both times! The people we have gone to see do not live in environments that I am used to for sure and I could bet most of you aren't either.

The first time we were taking a mom to visit her child at Village of Hope which is another Thembalitsha project about an hour away from Themba Care. It was a whole day affair and there was a lot of going back and forth trying to find the mom! She was not home when she was supposed to be home for us to pick her up and we ended up going to the hospital to look for her and then back to where she lived and then checked another place and then back home where we finally found her.

Her other child came with us to visit the younger sibling as well and she has an adorable smile but an awful smell...once we were at Village of Hope the Occupational Therapist there said it looked as if the child had not been bathed in weeks. She also said that when she visited the mom at home in the summer when she first received the child at Village of Hope she had to walk through a wall of flies to get to the door. It is interesting to me because there is one child that was taken away from the mom and is not allowed to go back because the living conditions are too poor but she has another child that she is able to keep....and I know back home if one child is taken away then all are taken away.

The second time I went was just a short two hour trip to a Creche (pre-school) in a Township that was about 15 minutes away from Themba Care. We went to talk to the teacher of a child we are working with to see how his behavior is in the school (his mom has said that he is very naughty and wild and does not cooperate in regards to taking his medicine) and see if she had any information that could help us assess where he was developmentally. We had to be careful because we could not disclose to the teacher that the child was HIV positive....our Occupational Therapist simply said that she was assigned to the child to assess his development.

The Creche had holes in the ceiling and walls and the chairs looked like they were about to come apart. It was not an environment I would typically associate with a pre-school. But, it was clear that the teacher cares about the children. It may not be an ideal environment but these children were still learning colors and other things to prepare them for "big school".

It has been so interesting so far....I'm glad that I'm getting to be part of their social system here to some extent and see how it works.

This is Graceland...the Creche that I go to two days a week. On the left is where three classrooms and a kitchen are and on the right is the toilets and then a playground in the back.

This is the Creche that we visited in the Township...