This Moment in Time will Never Come Again

The Guilty Observers

Rumors started flying around about a marshal law lockdown, then possibly barricading off the informal settlements where I work, and maybe even evicting foreigners from the country.

So here I am in South Africa with a looming feeling of panic starting to come over me. I'm sitting down to write this story and have no idea where it should start…but have a very clear idea about the ending because I’m living in it.

It is January 2020 and even from early on it was very clear from day one that my time here was not going to go as planned.  Even though I’m from Nova Scotia, Canada, I also work half the year in one of the many informal township settlements in the Western Cape region of South Africa called Thembalethu.

One of my first days of work I was driving on my own into the township. Out of nowhere a massive bull stormed full force over a hwy gate and landed directly in front of my moving car on the turn-off. It easily could have flattened my small rental or creamed the terrified rasta pedestrian next to me.

The bull bolted off into other traffic and left me and the pedestrian stunned in the notion that we both just had a very close encounter. When I arrived at one of our small preschools we assist I told the headteacher Princess what happened to me. She said oh yes, this happened to a man here last month, the bull went through his windshield. I asked if he was ok, she said "No he died".

As I am there the odd reports start to roll in more and more about places with no toilet paper, having to wash your hands more, “Don’t touch your face”, and so on. So far here in South Africa it was generally understood that there was some serious virus affecting immune-comprised people and old people in China and some in Europe.

Conversations on our end went along the lines of, “No, it won’t come to Africa.”

Others said, “We are the ass end of the Titanic here. It won’t get to us until the end. But then we’re all going down.”

I paid attention here and there but was going to go about my work helping the children in the local townships with our health and education projects with Project COLORS International and CHOYCE Humanitarian Consulting.
There was far too much to be done to get sidetracked.

 As I went around to the small care centers, the teachers there told me how the children did not have consistent food for months. There used to be a feeding distribution program for over 1000 kids, but it went out the window in November due to some unfortunate local events and outside decision making.

Now more than ever, our immune-boosting feeding program with Epap for children under 5 seemed more necessary and life-saving than we ever planned for.

This had to get up and running again! We were all very distressed about this and the Epap team also wanted to continue supplying and donors wanted to keep giving; so we were all so thankful a company called DataDot Technology hired an amazing lady Franceska to help make sure the deliveries of food continue to happen properly.

Franceska is on the back left

Franceska was new to community aid work but very organized and enthusiastic.
We made a great team from the start as we worked together to try and find all the informal children’s centers on a sprawling community with no street signs. With her truck we dropped off food while also providing the bowls, cups, and spoons needed for the daily feeding program.
This is now a much larger feeding project than what I have done in the past.

Now we were all back on track and everything was looking up

But now because of the looming pandemic, other major issues popped up.

You see the area I work has a high percentage of the community that are immune-compromised for various reasons largely due to HIV/AIDS, TB, unhealthy living conditions and malnutrition.
Many of these small informal child care centers had no real running water for all this emergency hand washing the news is going on about.

People hardly have enough money for food, so how can they possibly find the money for hand sanitizer? In this area there is a large population located in a small condensed area with communal living situations, families sometimes live five to ten to a room, plus there is a lack of washing facilities.

It does not take much to realize that it all adds up to a dangerous and explosive concoction if the Coronavirus arrives here. Vulnerable communities like this are most likely to drop even further into poverty if the virus hits. It is virtually impossible for them to social distance so it could spread like a wildfire.

Now into February, the Coronavirus was now a main topic all over the globe.  But unfortunately, this is still not a main concern for the people in the areas where I work. No one really understands what the big deal is about handwashing and hygiene.

Each day we see three-year-olds walking around with constant runny noses, open sores, ringworm. Kids are all sharing cups and spoons, there are no wipes or tissues for coughs and, of course, there is very little handwashing in most locations.

After a wonderful few weeks also working with some German and Holland patrons who assisted our programs with dental workshops and toddler education, my mind now had to switch gears overnight to a new form of assistance.

I’m lying in bed reading articles with alarming headlines like, “Developing Countries are Hurtling to a Catastrophe,” “Lockdown Pending,” “ When the Pandemic Hits the most Vulnerable,” “Poor and Uninformed are Sitting Ducks,” “Pending High Mortality Rates Due to Lack of Access to Water.”

And the one that hit home most for me was titled, “Pandemic will Wipe out the Most Vulnerable in Developing Countries.”

Oh shit, that’s us!

I remember clearly saying to myself, “Tomorrow we launch a hand washing, basic virus education and hygiene program.” Then just as quickly I realize there is no “we.” I didn’t have any volunteers to help tomorrow!

I wrote to several local people for support and on the ground help; and I literally prayed to God and the universe to send me an answer and the help to pull off my plan.

We needed to prepare the people for this pandemic ASAP. At this stage in time, nothing was being done!

All I knew was that the children's centers needed this right now. These small preschools are filled with 30-50 children run in the grandmothers’ back shacks and the women caring for them with little resources to prepare for this.

I did not get much sleep making all these plans swimming around my head on logistics, supplies to get, trying to simplify the information they needed, designing a workshop, etc.….. Somewhere in there I fell asleep. When I woke up I had two messages!

One was from Felisha, my landlord, saying she would come help and another was from one of my past mentorship youth, Verna, who canceled her work to come too. Luckily, I also had several emails promising extra donations to go to first aid and medical supplies after my last post about a poor little boy Leo we were helping who had horrible sores on his hands and head and another boy suffering from bad burns.

I also knew I had upfront core donations from the Whalen family, Edmonds landscaping and last year's fundraisers that I would have to use to do most of for this. So grateful to everyone for this emergency money!

I am pretty diligent at stretching money as far as possible, but now the COLORS account did not know what hit it as we needed to find all the supplies right now with no time to be thrifty.
Our three-person team bought buckets with water taps, soaps, hand sanitizers, empty bottles to make more sanitizer, wipes, clothes, basins and medication for the two children I promised care to.

We downloaded an amazing children's Coronavirus education workshop onto our phones which we used at the child care centers. Verna, who speaks Xhosa, translated the digital cartoons and acted out the screens for the children. The kids thought this was the best play ever. (Workshop link at end of this story)

"Don't touch your face" - As you can tell there's a lot of work to be done 

New handwashing stations were created by using buckets with taps, plastic basins and soap. 

Workshops teaching the kids to wash their hands were created as fun games against germs and viruses; the kids loved it and the teachers were grateful beyond words.

Other days I went around with Franceska as we delivered the immune-boosting breakfasts and also refilled first aid kits with health care supplies. Often these first aid kits are the only first response care kits available in each neighborhood. If the townships are barricaded off as the rumors claimed, they will all need these kits more then ever.

Our 1st aid kits supplies ran out quickly as we had way more child care centers to help then the supplies I brought from Canada. Now we are on a mission to buy more in a place with dwindling care supplies as shelves were emptying fast everywhere.

More funds came from people in Canada, USA, Germany, Holland. THANK YOU

Each center got a "first-aid-in-a-bottle"/hand sanitizer which can also be used for first aid care and disinfection.  It's a program I have personally struggled to get others to help with for years locally in that area. It is easy to make and now it is something everyone is begging for left, right and center.

One weekend in early March two of my past mentorship youth, Verna and Bianca, came to live with me. We brainstormed how they could help their community in an emergency, how they could be agents of change, and educate those around them in this pandemic. 

Their ideas made me proud. Verna said, "Sunny, I know that whatever we plan, we need to have a plan ABC and Z because that’s what you always told us since we were little. We can teach the kids in crèche, send the workshop over social media and Wassup it to friends, explain to people at work and clients about washing hands.”

Bianca said she wanted to help make the hand sanitizers for everyone, so we set up a station at the sink and created bottles in every size we could find. Let me tell you, I don’t think any of us will ever throw away another spray bottle. We even dumped hair care products out so we could fill the bottles with sanitizer. The girls gasped at this but knew what we had to do.

On Monday morning I took the girls home and I went out with Franceska to deliver more supplies. We revisited the boys who got the extra medicine. The small boy Leo with all the painful open wounds and head sores ran up to me when the teacher Nokonwaba pointed out that we were at the door. She yelled out, “Look at his healing!”

Before

After

He went to hug me as I saw his wounds were almost all better!

I was sad I could not hug him back given the plight we were now all in. Even though it was a very stressful day I realized that these were the moments why I did this work.  

We continued until the supplies were distributed to as many projects as we could get to.

In the township, the atmosphere was changing before our eyes as the people in the community became more aware of what was happening in the world. There was more stress and panic.
Shops and schools were shutting down. People were filling the streets and yelling.

I remember clearly Franceska and I looking at each other after going past a gang of boys in the middle of dodgy dirt pothole road….and we both knew a sad fact.

It was time to pull out.  We'd done all we could on our own safley.

During these last few months, it was a rare day that we would see another group supporting these child care centers. Maybe once a month? Other help existed in the past, so it was sad to see such little practical support. 

Education is key right now and the people need pro-active help to prepare for a pandemic.

We desperately needed a larger team to help support some basic common-sense health and hygiene programs. We needed more handwashing and virus education for the most vulnerable and, most of all, empowering them by giving them the resources to not only care for themselves but care for each other.

I mean, you can tell people to wash their hands all you want  - but if they don’t understand how germs and viruses spread or have water on-site and soap to help prevent…its not hard to connect the dots.

In the past, I did see that other programs helping, but now many of the old washing stations were broken or no longer existed. We did the best we possibly could in this area covering over 33 children's projects filling in the gaps with the money and volunteers we had.

All I hope is that extra support steps up soon from core health care providers and government.

I pride myself on spending my time with the people on the ground doing what needs to get done by working alongside them, asking them what their needs are. Teaching with the teachers.

It makes me personally very upset when I know there’s so much aid money out there that never gets to the people who need it most.

It should make us all upset.

Yes, maybe other supports are caught up with making a big plan for later. I get that.

Maybe all the policies and processes were not yet in place…too much red tape, maybe some head dude who has never set foot in the communities, did not yet give the go-ahead so everyone sits on their hands. But there was just a short window to prepare, so why not take it?

If a small group of volunteers can get these workshops and life-saving preparatory supplies to over 1000 children at the drop of a hat, then I don’t know why larger NGOs with 100x more capacity could not do the same at this time.

During this pandemic, I think a lot of us have finally taken a step back to see what’s really going wrong with the world, our systems and priorities.

Over the years in Canada I have sifted through thousands and thousands of dollars of discarded boxes of gloves, masks, face shields (ventilator parts, bandages, splints, band-aids)….soooooooo much equipment being trashed by our Canadian medical and government systems.

Also thousands and thousands of perfectly good first aid kits just thrown away.
LOADS and loads of waste.

So much life-saving material just garbaged and only a small percentage of it actually expired (still in sealed containers). Why? Storage space? Red tape, brands, top-down decisions...who knows!

Garbage????

Don’t get me wrong, I am eternally grateful to the amazing people who reach out to make sure small NGOs like ours can have these lifesaving items. But these are brave people who see the system is flawed, know there’s nothing wrong with the supplies and make the extra effort to find the supplies a refuge.

Thank god for them! People who think for themselves, people who care.

If you had the option to have last year’s sealed box of unused discarded masks or having NONE, not even one mask…what would you pick?

Would anyone actually pick NONE, which is the state we are currently faced with all over the globe. 

Garbage???

Is plausible that big pharma and manufacturing compies want you to buy more goods and throw loads of last year’s unopened boxes of care items away before they are really actually expired? Is it possible to entertain the possibility that some of these rules and regulations are actually just building the profits?

Today we live in the reality that people are stretched so far as to having to make their own masks out of old sheets and recycled items.

I morn for the loss of all these medical supplies, disposed of by our own hospitals in Canada, as they tossed out tons of them.  I wish I was lying, but this is the society we live in…..waste….want…access…greed and denial.

Maybe my 20 years of being an international aid worker has jaded my view.

These are the things I truly hope society and humanity take a chance to re-evaluate during this time when the need is so great. The examples of similar travesties are endless. I’m sure we all have a story of needless waste and neglect.

Maybe now that the world is in a full-on shutdown, this is a chance to learn from our mistakes and maybe learn to use some common sense instead of blindly following like lemmings off a cliff.

Our priorities need to change.

Our hearts need to change.

I truly believe in the idea that “The worst action is inaction." 

Watching malicious and immoral acts without saying a word is as bad as participating, we all allow them to continue.

We are all accountable.

I often think about the saying 'This moment in time will never come again'.

I think we have all missed many important moments when action should have been taken and so many people just stand by as guilty observers.

THANK YOU to everyone who has taken this moment in time to help these children through
CHOYCE Humanitarian & Project COLORS International.

http://projectcolors.com/
https://sunyatachoyce.wixsite.com/choycehumanitarian

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TOOLKIT: 

Project COLORS is happy to promote this amazing learning tool 

supporting and reassuring children around the world during the Coronavirus. 

#COVIBOOK By Manuela Molina

Follow this link for pdfs in multiple languages for print or to use on your phone!

https://www.mindheart.co/descargables