Hotel Malawi

Dear Friends and Fellow Bloggers – I hope you are as well as possible. My stint in Malawi is soon ending, and I am happy to be going home to my family, especially for hugs and cuddles with my husband and children. In truth, the time here has been really difficult and akin in my opinion to the story told in Hotel Rwanda. Hotel Rwanda was an international hotel that housed people during the Rwandan Genocide. It was a story told of people kept safely with dwindling sources of food, and increasing over-capacity when serious danger lurked just outside the walls. Whilst Malawi is not facing the same kind of trouble, it’s people are in danger none-the-less.

The level of poverty in Malawi is astounding and I don’t know how each family with their children gets by. Basic groceries (mostly not meeting children’s nutritional requirements), even maize flour, are frightfully expensive let alone important things like safe water, access to protein and cooking fuel. Many take to begging with no other form of employment, or ride motorbikes under the pretense of being taxi drivers without the requisite skills, training or licensing resulting in one of the world’s largest levels of road fatalities and death. If I could help everyone I would, but I know that’s way beyond my capacity.

I suppose my question to the world is how and when we will stop closing our eyes to the starvation genocide that is taking out beautiful countries and people like these in Malawi. I want to believe that if we all came together and sent what we could (through the right mechanisms) we would be able to help the challenged people who are simply trying to live and get by. I want to believe that we who have so much more would understand and give to those who have so much less. I have tried to give what I could and worked hard whilst here but please let us not forget those that continue to be trapped in Hotel Malawi. Stay blessed and for those who celebrate, Happy Easter.

Dear Mr. President

There is a saying *which I do not agree with* which says that often the blind lead the blind. Plainly speaking it means that someone important may not be looking where they’re going and dragging the whole bang lot of us along / down with them.  I, having never taken to geography or anything graphy, would follow, and will go down hard. In South Africa, certainly in recent years, I have learnt instead that those leading are those who most have to address, or are affected by the very ‘impediments’ their constituent are so, so, so intimately acquainted with.  Yes, I’ve learnt that it is the crazy leading the crazy here, and I’ve decided that I will no longer follow the Pied Piper.  And in this instance, here, that’s you and all those who do nothing meaningful to address our plight.

Over the duration of my engagement with the public health system (I’ve tried to work and fund my own healthcare for as long as I could), it broke me and fundamentally impacted on my family and does to this day.  It has and continues to subject me and those sicker than me to conditions not suitable for any living being. Ranging from being discarded from State Institutes to communities and streets not ready or suitable for vulnerable people at all, to dirty hospitals without even basic essentials such as toilet paper. Nurses who don’t come or care, Doctors who blurt out in a room a diagnosis that you are so bitterly ashamed of to an entire ward or hospital triage room, medication in my opinion, that is in short supply.  And that’s when you are lucky to receive a service. I have and know of people who have been turned away from the health system because they were not suicidal or dead enough to be admitted.

Seemingly the standard employed by the State is dead or dying, if Life Esidemeni is anything to go by.   We didn’t or don’t matter. But it would be silly to talk about that.  I am not a politician or something amazing and by the standard of treatment (mostly the lack thereof) the system has deemed me and mine not worthy of living or carrying on.  But I, Mr. Pied Piper President don’t believe that.  I am a mother.  I am a wife.  I am a daughter.  I am a community.   I am a mother to many more than to whom I have given birth.  My medication, services to me, and everyone like me SAVES LIVES and HEALS COMMUNITIES. And yes, there is empirical proof.

People are dying in my country and the scourge of mental health challenges and impact on communities is far greater.  And you know.  And relative to service provision you have done nothing. So each time I am denied a service, which could and has had a life-threatening impact on me, my family, and each of my children I will sue you.  Our communities will sue you. I and the communities I will help will sue you for our right to health.  We have paid for it with our lives, with the lives of our families, and there are many, many, many more who continue to suffer without treatment.  We will show, document and photograph what you do and allow in service to South Africa’s health.I will talk to people like me, and we will do what we can do, for as long as it takes for you to hear and see, and feel our voice. Mr. Pied Piper President, we will no longer listen to your deadly song. Be part of those who support us as opposed to those who don’t.  I am 4 M’s Bipolar Mom.