October 24 - Jim Bradley

Friday October 24
Jim Bradley
We started today with a typical Swaziland breakfast: sausage, ham, fried eggs, toast, and marmalade. This is invariably accompanied by porridge, hot tea, or instant coffee.
After sunrise service in the Thokoza Chapel, we boarded our two Toyota vans. First stop is always to fuel up the vans, and also to stock up with bottled water, chocolate, and potato crisps.
Our journey today takes us east and south toward the borders or Mozambique and South Africa. By late morning we are at St. Augustine’s Anglican Mission, where a hard-working parish priest, Rev. Mbatha and his wife run a “feeding scheme” or soup kitchen for about 60 pre-adolescent children orphaned by the plague of HIV/AIDS the effect of which is visible wherever you look here. Rev. Mbatha feeds his children from a burlap-walled 12’x12’ kitchen and a 20’ x 30’ school room, tin roofed and dried mud floor. Modern steel-trussed building skeletons are waiting to be walled when additonal funds are found. The cost of the steel skeleton includes the roof which cannot be installed until the foundation and walls are in place. According to Rev. Mbatha, last year he and his wife furnished two meals five days a week. Now, because of funding, these orphans eat only 1 meal, 3 days a week. Life is hard and getting harder for many here in Swaziland.
Mary Jane, Terry, and others stayed at St. Augustine’s to conduct nutrition and dental exams, while the rest of us traveled 30 minutes over bumpy roads to Maphungwana. There we demonstrated our chlorine machine as part of a sort of tribal or community council. Here, about 50 men and women gathered under a spreading ghude tree to decide community disputes and discuss community business. The had favorable reports about the water chlorinators from other nearby communities, and were eager to learn how to use the machines we demonstrated and left with them.
Driving back to Rev. Mbatha’s dust-blown soup kitchen, we picked up Terry, Mary Jane, and the others. On the way back to Mbabane we were hosted to cold soda and cookies by a couple that remembered Rom and Toni Noah from their previous trip.
Back at Thokoza, we practiced for our singing debut Sunday at the big 40/40 stadium celebration. We have chosen, “I the Lord of Sea and Sky” and “Do Lord, Do Remember Me.” After supper, some of us went to the Cathedral for another rollicking, Swaziland Anglican revival. Thus ends another day is this very beautiful, very dry, and very AIDS stricken kingdom.