There Are Three New Double Orphans in Lesotho

About a year ago I was in a meeting with the management team at Phelisanang Bophelong, regarding a piggery project we were looking at supporting. PB, as it is more commonly known, is the local HIV/AIDS support group, based out of a small building on the campus of the local government hospital, Motebang. At the conclusion of the meeting, ‘M’e Thakane, the executive director at PB, asked if she could talk to me about another matter. She then told me about an HIV+ widow out in the neighbouring village of Khanyane. She is a member of PB and a patient at Tsepong. Her name is Makhotso. (Mother of Peace). Her HIV+ husband died from an opportunistic infection some years ago. She has three children. The oldest is Khotso, approximately 20 years old. He drifts around, coming home for short visits that are weeks or months between them. The daughter in Mahlonolo, aged 12. A beautiful girl with a ready smile and laugh. The youngest is a boy, Lebohang, aged 7. He’s a good kid, but always into mischief and like many boys, has a hard time keeping clean and staying out of trouble. What ‘M’ e Thakane wanted from me that day was support for the family. PB did not have money in their budget to provide even a small portion of what the family needs. They have nothing. They stay in a borrowed, decaying rondavel. There is no income. The mother was so ill from not eating well that her ARVs were doing nothing for her. The 12 year old girl had assumed the role of caregiver to her mom and mother to her younger brother. She’s 12. It ain’t right. So, with ‘M’ e Thakane gently twisting my arm, I bought some groceries and paid my first visit. It was sobering. The center peak of the thatch roof was all but gone. Then floor had worn down to a shallow concave shape. And when it rains, the floor becomes a small pond. The kids were amazing, and ‘M’ e Makhotso, who was lying on an old, very thin mattress on the floor, so ill that she could barely raise herself up a few inches to greet me, but still insisted on doing so in an effort to be a good hostess to a visitor. I was hooked from that moment. We unpacked the groceries and put them away, and got her started on drinking a small container of milk. Over the next few months I visited every few weeks, usually bringing food. One time the two little kids and I went into town for school shoes and backpacks. They had been going to school barefoot. The principal allowed it only because she knew the family situation. ‘M’e Makhotso learned my name on the first visits and always remembered me on arrival. On the first few subsequent visits, ‘M’e Makhotso’s condition seemed unchanged. I grew discouraged. Why wasn’t she getting better? But, about 10 weeks from my initial visit, improvement happened. I came one day to find her sitting up on her mat. It seemed amazing and I was encouraged.. A few weeks later I found her sitting on a bench outside in the sun. Both kids were there and a neighbour was visiting. It was wonderful. A few weeks after that I arrived on my next visit to find her in the middle of doing laundry. I was blown away! She was still painfully thin, and didn’t move well, but she was getting better. At Christmas we had a new roof put on the place and began construction of a new stone home adjacent to the current one. PB found some additional funding in the months following, and my visits became less frequent. But I still went from time to time, and things continued to look promising. On Sunday evening of last week, about 6 weeks since my last visit, I got a phone call from the neighbour. ‘M’e Makhotso was sick, had stopped eating and taking her meds. “Could you help with transport to the hospital, now-now-now?” ‘M’e Mahlompho and I got into the car, went out to Khanyane, and with the help of a group of neighbours, who carried her in a blanket some 200 yards down the side of a big hill, we got Makhotso into the back seat of the car and were off to Motebang hospital’s emergency room. The lady was very thin, appeared to be delirious, and could not walk or get up on her own. She was somewhere between her late thirties or early forties, but her present state of health, you could guess she was my age and not be faulted. Different people in the group tried talking to her, but she really couldn’t communicate. I came over and just held her hands. They were so cold. And she clutched mine so tightly it almost hurt. But at least she was still and quiet for a while. Within a few minutes of our arrival, ‘M’e Makhotso was admitted into the female medical ward. It is a very cold brick building in the winter. The floors and walls were filthy. The room they placed her in contained 8 beds and the atmosphere was chaotic. The shared sink was so dirty you didn’t even want to touch the faucet. After sticking around for a while, we left the woman moaning in her bed. The nurses requested that we drop soap, a facecloth and toilet paper in time for bathing the following morning, no later than 6:00 a.m. So on Monday morning I appeared at the female medical ward doors and went to ‘M’e Makhotso’s room where a tired, overworked nurse with an attitude laid into me hard about the fact that they needed those supplies at 4:00 a.m. and I was too late. Furthermore, I was informed that the hospital had a routine and I was interrupting it. Momentarily incredulous, I found myself almost apologizing as I explained to this nurse that I was right on time, as per her instructions. Early, in fact. She was having none of it. And when I said if she had told me 4:00 a.m., I would have been there at 4:00 a.m., she had the brass to tell me that there was no way that I could have been there at 4:00 a.m. as hospital security would never have let me in at that time. And she said “where is the sports bottle? I cannot get the patient to drink from a regular glass.” Giving it up as a lost cause, I turned on my heel and made my exit. It gets better. I returned at noon with a sports bottle in hand only to have the day shift nurses dress me down because ‘M’e Makhotso was refusing to eat, had pulled her IV out three times and wouldn’t take her meds. Hey, two out of those three were why we brought her into the hospital. So, I am 0-for-2 with the nurses in just under 6 hours. As I reached the front gate of the hospital I run into 12-year old Mahlonolo, accompanied by one of ‘M’e Makhotso’s neighbours, on their way to visit. As I look into this kid’s terrified eyes, my heart melts. In those eyes you can see that she is already dealing with the possibility that she may soon be the head of the household. The girl is limping badly. She was hit by a taxi about 4 months previous and her leg had been broken in multiple spots, and this is the first time I have seen her since the cast came off. It was only then that I realized this kid was never going to take two normal steps again in this lifetime. And to top it off, she has seen her mom sicken and grow weak for the second time in a year. My partner, ‘M’e Mahlompho and I, visited ‘M’e Makhotso twice daily for the following two days. Each time we found her the same, not better, but not really worse. Painfully thin. Not responsive to questions, even when we asked her about her kids. Mentally, she was checking out. Today I got busy with other things and did not go to the hospital at lunch time. I picked Mahlompho up after work, and as we were passing the hospital, Mahlompho remarked that it was almost 6:00 p.m., which is when evening visiting hours start. So we pulled in and parked. And then we walked down to the women’s ward. We entered Makhotso’s room and her bed was neatly made and very empty. No nurses were in sight. We sat at the bench facing the nurse’s station and waited. After a few minutes a door across the hall opened a few inches, and a few seconds later, it closed again. A minute after that the same door opened fully and a nurse emerged. Same one as from the night before. She knew who we were there to see, yet still she asked. Then, after she stared up at the ceiling for a few seconds, she told us what we had already known for some time. ‘M’e Makhotso has passed away. Turns out she had passed about 5:30 a.m. that morning. So now there are three more double orphans in Lesotho. A twelve year old is going to raise her seven year old brother as best she can. A twenty year old young man is going to drift around without purpose Life is hard. Life isn’t fair. Those statements hold true all over the world. But today, life seems most unfair, most hard, here in Lesotho.

Does everything REALLY happen for a reason?

One of my (many) spiritual challenges is the idea that everything happens for a reason.

Recently when I hosted a number of visitors from Canada who were members of a faith group, I found that they frequently referred to events that occurred throughout any given day during their visit were “sent” to the group as a message or direction from God.

I struggle with this belief.

I mean, I figure that God is a busy guy. There are almost 7 billion people on the planet. How can he be looking out and planning for the seemingly million things that we have happen in each of our lives every day? Surely sometimes we simply trip and fall. Or turn one direction onto a street rather than another. Can it really all be pre-ordained? If we take a seemingly random action, like choosing a restaurant, and then meet someone there that we otherwise would not likely have met, is that really a case of God setting a plan into motion?

Like I said earlier, I struggle with this. How does it fit into another tenet of faith, “free will?”

Today I took public transport up to Butha Buthe for a meeting with the team at the Apostolic Faith Mission Social Development Division (AFMSDD). I got into a ¾ empty taxi and rather than sitting and waiting for it to fill up, as is the norm here in Lesotho, the driver pulled away immediately after I got in. Was that random? Or was it because it was “meant to be?” Within 10 minutes the taxi was full from various roadside pick ups of passengers. (This is something that I had long theorized would happen if drivers just picked up and went rather than waiting for their taxis to fill).

When we arrived at the Butha Buthe bus stop I got out and walked towards the church. There was a street vendor on the corner selling molamu, the traditional stick carried by Basotho men, particularly shepherds. I had seen him there before because I was looking at buying one, but did not make the purchase at that time. Today I did. Was that fate? Or just a random decision with no particular impact for my life, or for the vendor’s? I don’t know but somehow the transaction got me thinking about “everything happens for a reason” and I walked off down the street with my new possession, and it was to the amusement of many of the people I passed. The Basotho often seem to get a kick out of foreigners doing or saying anything that is a cultural norm for them.

I arrived at the church about 20 minutes later after huffing and puffing my fat ass up the hill, and sat down outside to await the arrival of the AFMSDD team. I was a little early and they tend to be a little late. Half an hour later the pastor pulled up in his bakkie, alone. I knew something was up because his wife, ‘M’e Matšepo always accompanies him to our meetings. When he got out of the bakkie I saw that he was dressed in work clothes, wearing gum boots and carrying a sledge hammer. Not your typical pastoral garb. I asked him what was up and he explained that he was from the AFMSDD farm plot, where they were working on building a bit of a dam in the river to form a pool from which to draw water with their irrigation pump. My next question was did he remember that we were to meet today to complete the application form to open a health clinic. He said yes, but looked uncertain. Then we established that he would prefer to delay our meeting so as to complete this dam project (ha ha) if it was okay with me.

Always doing my best to be accommodating, I said no problem and immediately began plotting lunch at KFC, which in some ways, for me at least, is one of the best features of the town of Butha Buthe.

Pastor James offered me a lift back into town as he needed to visit the hardware store and I accepted. On the drive I told him about my purchase of a walking stick and asked him about my quandary of the day, “does everything happen for a reason?” His response (abbreviated greatly by me) was in the affirmative. He explained that his belief system featured an omnipotent God who planned out things long in advance. A God who knows each of us and has a plan for all. He also talked about how interconnected things are in life and described God’s omnipotence as being, in some ways, similar to the storage device in a computer. And then he gave an example of the interconnectedness of things with the following story:

Another pastor, a friend of his, travels a lot to different bible schools and universities across southern Africa as a teacher of prayer. This pastor has manuals which he hands out before each workshop that he leads. Some years back this pastor travelled to the university where his daughter was taking her degree in order to lead a prayer seminar. When the seminar was over, the pastor drove home, a distance of several hundred kilometres. When he reached home, he realized that he had left a large number of excess manuals behind in error. There were many more of these manuals back at home so there was no need to return immediately to retrieve the forgotten manuals. Months passed, and the manuals became completely forgotten by the pastor.

The pastor’s daughter was travelling to another city one weekend for a church event. The city she was going to was not far from her home town, so she packed her father’s manuals on the off chance that she had the opportunity to go home after she and her friends attended their planned church event. When they got to the city they were headed for, despite already being late for it, the group of students decided that they were hungry and must go to McDonald’s for breakfast.

The pastor, en route to a speaking engagement, and with no idea that his daughter was in that city, decided he was hungry and pulled into the same McDonald’s for breakfast for himself, just as his daughter and her friends were sitting down to eat their breakfast.

Pleased to see her dad, the young woman approached and greeted him and then told him she had the long forgotten manuals in the car and retrieved them, putting them into her father’s car.

At this point in Pastor James’ recounting of the tale I thought “yeah, yeah, sure, sure, I get it.”

But he wasn’t quite done. The father and daughter parted company and that pastor went on to his speaking event. While unloading the car with the materials for his seminar, he realized that he had forgotten to pack the manuals which were a key part of the material that he would be presenting that morning. The very same type of manuals which his daughter had given him at McDonald’s, even though neither she nor he had any plans for meeting that morning.

And that, Pastor James concluded, was a very good example of the interconnectedness of God’s plans for people’s lives.

Although I am still far from convinced that “everything happens for a reason,” I must admit that this story gave me some serious pause.

James and I parted company and I went inside to the KFC for my lunch. I noticed a young white woman who entered shortly after I placed my order. Just a passing glance, really. Here in Lesotho, once you leave the capital, there are so few whites that we really stand out in a crowd. But I have this trait in my own behaviour which makes me avoid approaching other white people when I see them. My brain says, “what, you are going to go over and say what – hi white person, I’m white too, let’s be pals?” So I got my food and sat down and ate it.

Ten minutes later, a vaguely familiar young Mosotho man approaches and greets me, asking if I am Ntate Andy who has attended his church sometimes? I tell him yes, and he introduces himself, Godfrey (the Basotho, as a general rule, have the most interesting English names). And then he introduces me to Elizabeth, his wife, who turns out to be the young white woman who entered KFC shortly after me just a few minutes earlier. Of course I am surprised, as I know only one other mixed race couple here excluding ‘M’e Mahlompho and I. Of course it is not a problem, just surprising.

And then I remembered her. When I attended a Sunday service at the AFM church in Butha Buthe almost a year ago, I remember turning around in my chair to “check out” the congregation and a number of rows back I spotted this young white woman. I remember at the time being surprised to see another white person at the service. I assumed she was a Peace Corps volunteer and never thought of her again until today. If our meeting at the church this morning had gone on as planned, I likely would not have met this young couple.

So now I have begun the waiting process to see if today’s “chance” meeting turns out to have happened “for a reason.” Pastor James cautions that sometimes it takes years for such purposes to become clear. So I guess that I will just wait and see.