This is Themba.
Interview of Fr. Martin Trieb O.S.B. with Mrs. Clare A. Kalkwarf D.M.
This is Themba.
Themba came to us when she was three months old. She was abused by her mother and the social workers removed her from the care of the mother and put her into our safekeeping. The social workers are trying to rehabilitate the mother so that Themba can be returned to her, but in the meantime she stays with us and she has grown and improved like a normal little girl, and as you see the scar on her leg as almost disappeared now. She is one and a half years old now and a very happy normal child.
This is a picture of Themba when she came in. As you can see she has a burn on her leg, which is from an iron for ironing clothes.
This was the abuse that her mother imposed on her and as you can see, we have healed the wound and she is now a wonderful little girl.
This is Nokubonga. Nokubonga was born six weeks premature.
When she came to us she was badly malnourished. She was underdeveloped and not thriving because her mother had abandoned her to her father for financial reasons. The father didn’t know what to do with such a tiny baby and so had fed her on sugar water only and fortunately he had enough sense to go to the social workers and the social workers phoned us and asked us if we could take her to look after her. We said: „Of course, we can take her in.“ We took her in and be treated her accordingly and, as you can so now, he is also one and a half years old and she has developed beautifully, she is fat and she is happy and she is jolly and she is highly intelligent and full of spirit and full of mischievous.
Bongani is also now one and a half years old. He was brought to us by his own father because he was malnourished and he is he was far too small for his age. Bongani’s mother died about a month after he came in from AIDS not in our hospice, but in a Provincial Hospital. The problem with Bongani is he has what we call Alcohol Infant Alcohol Syndrome, which means that his mother actually was an alcoholic and drank an awful lot and also smoked an awful lot while she was pregnant and so he was born far too small and has never really grown to the right size. As I said, he is one and a half years old and should be twice the size he is now. It hasn’t affected his intelligence. Obviously he is quite intelligent and quite able to learn. For this we are very happy. We are trying to get him to a stage where he does start growing and then he will be returned to his father who will then continue to look after him.
Mxolisi is now nine years old. When he came to us he was eight years old. He is a very bad epileptic. He had a brain infarction when he was born and so he has he is badly mentally retarded. His mother has died of AIDS, but fortunately he is not HIV-positive. When he came in he was badly malnourished and he was not treated either for his epilepsy. He had had no medication and so he was fitting four to five times a day. When he came in, this is what he looked like. He weighed, he weighed twelve kilos at eight years old and as you can see, he was badly malnourished. ... Mxolisi has been with us for more than a year now and after only a few weeks of being here with good feeding and constant medication we got him to a stage where he was responding to us. When he came in he was totally unresponsive. He wasn’t laughing, he wasn’t crying, he never got cross, he was never happy. He showed absolutely no emotion and if you waved your hand in front of his eyes there was no response. As you can see now from the pictures, there has been a vast improvement in his development. He has put on a lot of weight, he is happy. He is eating properly and mostly we have managed to control his fitting. Together with the government hospitals they have helped us an awful lot. So, as you can see, Mxolisi is also very happy and will go on to grow into an adult.
This little boy, Thembinkosi, he is four years old. He has been with us for just over a year. He and his mother were both here together, both of them in full blown AIDS. His mother died here in our hospice last week and he remains with us at her request. The father is nowhere to be seen and there are no other family relatives and so he is truly what we term an AIDS-orphan and will will look after and nurse Thembinkosi until the dear Lord calls him. These children normally don’t live past the age of ten years and so we can give him a least a good few years still that he can grow and have a happy and peaceful life with us.
But as you can see from this room we have four children sleeping in here. This is for the bigger children. It is far too small. We have put aside four little rooms of our hospice for the children because we have nowhere else to put them. This is by no means ideal and we are appealing to everybody who has a heart, to help us to build a new children’s home which will be on top of the care centre. In this way we can give the children the home that they are lacking. We want to give them the comfort and the joy of a real home and in the circumstances they are in now we can’t do this. We give them the best possible care and as much love as we can, but it, as I said, it’s by no means ideal and we would like now to give them a lighter area, happy, brighter place in which they can live.
This baby came to our feeding scheme on Saturday and when we saw how badly malnourished he was, we decided to admit him to the Care Centre to the Children’s Home for about six weeks for what in our own inhouse language call „power-feeding“. This means that we are going to give him a high-protein diet which will help to overcome the problems that he has.
The problem he has is that he was fed purely on maize porridge and water because of the background of the people through this it causes what we call kwashiorkor, which has an effect on the liver function and through this they retain water in their tissues (oedema) and this you can see on his face, on his cheeks here and on his hands and his wrists – you can see how swollen they are - and on his legs and his feet are very badly swollen. What made me worried is that already on the ankles and the wrist the skin is starting to peel and that’s a very bad sign and this is why we decided, that we should actually admit him to the Care Centre for intense care and then once his is back in the normal shape again he will go back to his mother and we are now busy admitting him to the Children’s Home.
How long do you need? Weeks?
We said initially it would be for six weeks, but if it takes longer than that possibly three months. We don’t really have a time limit. We will just see how he develops. The nice thing is that his mother does care and she wants him back. She has not abandoned him.... This is baby number four. There are other children at home.
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This page was last updated on Tuesday, 22 April 2008 01:03:07