A report from an LCSB member recently returned from working with TLC Ministries in South Africa.

LETTER FROM AFRICA

by Hannah Dobson

Noise; a sea of black faces staring at you; and the words "What's your name?" repeated over and over.  That's what greeted me when I arrived on this farm, where I didn't know anyone or how anything worked - with only this feeling that I had been called to serve the orphaned and abandoned babies of South Africa.  After a few weeks, months, or, for some of us, years, the scene is just the same except that the question is no longer "Who are you?" but "Where did you went?"!  No matter that their grammar is wrong, they just want to know who is coming and going in their house.  Now I reply with "Where do you think I went?" and they reply, "The hospital."

They aren't often wrong!  99% of the time, if I go out it's to take a baby to casualty, to a clinic for their deformed thumbs, to monitor their HIV status or for a neo-natal follow up.  Sometimes I go out without a baby and come home with one, or sometimes two!  If I’ve been away for the weekend or longer the children set up a little chant: "Hannah's he'ya (here), Hannah's he'ya," which goes on until I've been bounced on and jumped on and kissed and hugged and generally squished within a few breaths of death.  When you push them all off, then comes the demand to know where you've been, who you've been with, why aren't they here and what you did without looking after babies.  Sometimes I think they believe that's all we volunteers do - they don't realise that we might have real lives outside the nursery and our 36 babies.

These older children, twenty-one of them from 3-11 years of age, are the adopted children of Thea, Pippa and Joanna, the Jarvis family.  When they couldn't find adoptive families for them as babies, they took them into their own family so that they would stay forever, loved.  Once you get through the mass of them you can get into the nursery.  They aren't supposed to follow but often do.  Here our babies spend their time with us as we do our best to feed, change, bath, play with and above all, love them.  Yes, we get frustrated with them and we all have bad days when we almost feel we couldn't care less.  The problem is that we actually care too much.  So, having a bad day makes us feel worse because we've been cross with these little guys whom we came here to serve.  That's when we have to take a step back and remind ourselves what brought us to TLC in the first place and what it is that keeps us here.  For most of us, it is our faith, or a particular aspect of out faith that shaped us when we were younger.  That is what led us here from all over the world to share a cottage with one bathroom for me and seven other girls; to work in a nursery that is always over-full, because if we can squash them in, we will not turn away any baby in need.

So when I've had a bad day, I remind myself why I came here.  It was just for my gap year, some people might say, and feel satisfied that they understand my reasoning.  They'd be wrong.  Yes, I wanted a gap year project (well now it's turned into two gap years), but there were so many options available.  The reason I chose TLC?  Well that comes back to God, Worth and St. Benedict.

Growing up with Worth as my main spiritual input, my faith has been shaped by what St. Benedict taught.  Hospitality, listening and service all feature as important, and here at TLC I can live my life as a service to others.  A definition of religion given in the Bible is to look after widows and orphans in their distress.  It is also written that whatsoever we do to one another we also do to Jesus, so when I serve these babies, I also serve my Lord.  When I change their nappies, I am serving my Lord.  Sounds a bit weird doesn't it?  But think about it for a minute and you realise that God never said we must do big things to get His attention or to gain entry to His kingdom.  All He asks for is that we treat others how we would wish to be treated, that we love one another and we do it all in His name.  If we live our lives in the way He wants us to, that's enough.  Can you imagine trying to sleep with your pants full of poo?  Gross, don't you agree?  Well, why should a three-month-old be any different?  They just need us to make them comfortable.

Okay, enough of poo!  One of my jobs is to take the babies to the hospital - and trust me, I shall never complain about the NHS.  Never!  You think there are long waiting times?  You must be joking!  It never ceases to amaze and distress me that it should take up to twelve hours from arriving at the hospital to get a three-week-old baby, dehydrated and struggling to breathe, onto a drip and admitted.  It's not because the hospital staff are slow, or lazy: they are not, they’re amazing.  It is because of the number of other babies and children in the paediatric casualty ward that are equally sick, so we all wait our turn.  I've learned an awful lot of patience, and now five or six hours seems quick.

The need over here is more huge than you can imagine, until you spend some time at the hospitals.  In one of them, they have a room with a piece of A4 paper, stuck up with Blu-Tak, saying, Abandoned Babies.  If you then look into the room, you see two long rows of cots, often with two babies to a bed being prop fed, left untouched and unstimulated because there is no one with the time to sit and feed and cuddle and change them.  And people wonder why we over-fill our own nursery.  After one visit to that particular hospital you will never hear anyone complain that we don't have enough staff for our babies, or that the hospitals should send them elsewhere.  There is no elsewhere.  Everywhere is crowded.  Everywhere is under-staffed.  At least if we take them, we know we are giving them the best opportunity for a better life, because we actively work to overcome the problems that they accumulate in the hospitals - bed sores, bruises, severe malnutrition, delay in their development.  We treat them like princesses and princes; we serve them as though they were the only one in our care and we love them until the day they are adopted into their own family.  There we know they will get treated even better and we trust in God that they are given all the chances they deserve.  What do we do once they are gone?  Well that is quite simple.  We carry on.  For every baby that is adopted there are two or more waiting to fill their bed; so we love them, say goodbye, and love the next one until it's our own time to leave.  Then we cry as we say goodbye, knowing that the work will carry on with different volunteers who all care as much as we did.

For more information about the work of TLC ministries and how to support their work, please visit www.tlc.org.za

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© Hannah Dobson, 2005. First printed in the Winter 2004/5 issue of Listen, the magazine of the Lay Community of St. Benedict. Reproduced with permission. The views represented on this page are the views of the individual contributor, not necessarily the official views of the Lay Community of St. Benedict.

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