The lightest piggy back

To love.

To love another.

To love another tirelessly.

An hour before the longest, hardest, most physically and emotionally draining day yet was complete I was I was asked to pick a patient up in Molweni; a town twenty minutes from the Respite Unit. Sweaty, exhausted, with a pounding headache and a queasy stomach I reluctantly said yes, knowing full well I really didn’t have a choice. Thankfully Mary-Kate came and drove, and one of the staff sat in the back to give directions. I tried hard to focus on anything other than the day I had just had.

6:40am: Our car is always parked in a garage and due to the spectacular thunder and lightning show last night the door to the garage had blown down and we found it locked this morning. After we all tried struggling with it we gave up and took our little car, which refused to start for the first ten minutes.

7:00am-11:30am: I used salt and water and cotton balls to remove dead skin, squeeze puss and blood from the bed wounds on every patient that had them. The smell of deteriorating skin, the sight of devastation done unto the body by HIV, and the silent tears that filled the vacant eyes took my breath away. I'm a of jumble sadness and frustration when working with wounds. I try my best to provide the patients with consistent love, but when flushing out a two inch deep hole in someone’s calf, loving quickly transitions into trying to make myself numb.

I still cannot put into words exactly how grave I feel every time I pull a bright flowery privacy curtain around a patient’s bed

...the tell tale preparation of undressing: revealing their bodies; revealing their wounds; revealing their collapse.

11:30-1:30: I sat with a dying man. It is true that the patients at the Respite are dying, fighting a disease that will eventually triumph, but you can never prepare. I could do nothing more than sit with him, hold his hand, try to comfort him in a language he didn’t understand and restrain his frail body whenever he tried to get out of bed. At 28 years old his breaths shallow, his eyes jaundice, his willpower lost. He was waiting on borrowed time for his family to arrive for the last time. As his sister and daughter arrived and I left his side he let out a sigh - an admission of defeat and with it my heart broke.

1:30-2: I counted statistics of all those who had died in 2009 at the Respite unit, I didn't finish counting before we had to go pick up the patient but the number was already 418

As Mary-Kate and I drove to pick up our patient I was miserable. I was grumpy, tired, nauseous and annoyed. As we entered Upper Molweni rounded the corners, saw the faces staring at us (two white girls clearly not from those parts) left pavement for dirt and drove deeper and deeper into the valley something began to change. The patients road was narrow, overgrown, steep and washed out from the rain. Mary-Kate stayed on the side of the road with the car while I accompanied the worker to the house. Her house, a thatch hut the size of my bathroom was filled with feces, bugs, flies, disorder and disarray. Two women, her neighbors helped us lift her out of bed.

She managed to walk maybe 7 steps before she collapsed on the ground, moaning in pain. Her friends were yelling at her in Zulu and in her weary voice she attempted to yell back, but instead repeated the same muffled words over and over. They told me she was saying “leave me here I want to die”.

I joined in with her neighbors – pulling her upwards, forcing her to move until it hit me. She couldn’t. Her disease was overpowering her body and if she couldn’t put up a fight I instead would. At orientation I heard Pat tell the story of his year here when he carried a woman up a hill when she no longer could do it herself and it gave me goose bumps to think of his kindness and dedication, but I never thought that I would be put in the same situation. Yet the only option I had was to make her neighbors lift her onto my back.

The path was uphill on loose gravel and my sandals were the absolute worst selection this morning. Her body was heavy, completely solid and could not help an ounce. skirt was soiled and wet, as became my back and her fingernails were digging into my skin as she tried to hold on. In a matter of seconds I know I was uncontrollably exhausted. I felt my body gasping for air, but I felt like I had more strength then ever before. As the brink of the hill approached somehow my very slow stagger turned into a jog. I have never felt so totally and completely able.

I don’t want to share these stories so you pity me, or so you start glorifying the work I’m doing. I’m not the hero, my body was a means to an end here; my compassion and love a necessity. The reason I choose to write about these thoughts is as wakeup call to myself. I know my job is hard. Its the nature of the position. Each of us here encounters suffering, death and pain and I think it is easy to focus on that because it is so prevalent.

But today I realized that the heaviest piggy back I have ever given weight wise, was the lightest load to carry. To love another tirelessly is always enough.