The week after exams in June, all the students were sent around to places in South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe to do a week of ministry at another church or Christian organization. Chester and I chose to do a HIV/AIDS related ministry as we were interested in finding out more after our summer school course.
We were placed at ECAP at Pieter Maritzberg (PMB), a town about 45mins drive from Durban, one of South Africa’s cities. For some reason, Chester and I had the wrong idea about what type of ministry we were going to do. We had been given the impression that ECAP was a hospice where we would be ministering to dying people. However, when we arrived, we realised that our week would in fact be completely different (in a good way of course)!
We arrived at Durban airport and were picked up by Pastor Albert Chetty and his wife Jaya, who would drive us to PMB. Pastor Chetty works at ECAP and is also the Minister at Entabeni Community Church. We would be staying with his family for the week, going in to work with him at ECAP each day and also participating in church activities throughout the week.
People had told me that Durban was the ‘Zulu nation’. I didn’t completely understand that until we started driving around and I realised that the majority of people were black. You may think this is a funny thing to say, especially as I am living in Africa – but in Cape Town, we have been exposed to pretty much an equal number of blacks, whites and coloureds, with no one race being more numerous in my eyes. However, in Durban, to my great surprise, practically everyone I saw was black. They were either Zulu or Indian – did you know that Durban has the highest number of Indians outside of India! You should see the amazing Indian spices that are at the local grocery stores – I am so jealous that we don’t get that type of variety in Cape Town or Sydney!
ECAP
The ECAP office staff. Pastor Chetty is next to me and Pastor Israel is in the middle; This poster summarises ECAP's objectives.
ESSA (Evangelical Seminary of South Africa) is a non-denominational bible college in PMB. A few years ago, it decided to create an arm to do practical ministry in the HIV/AIDS field. This is how ECAP started. ECAP, which stands for ESSA Christian AIDS Program, is a company that trains people to become care givers (like nurses) to HIV/AIDS patients. Pastor Chetty is the Office Manager and works with another guy called Pastor Israel who does the training and field work.
After our Summer School AIDS course, I felt really helpless in terms of the enormity of the crisis. I could not see many ways that the AIDS crisis was being dealt with, especially by the Christian community. ECAP really opened my eyes to the amazing ministry that Christians are doing. From our short time there, this is what I ascertained as how it works.
Pastor Israel, who is also Zulu, approaches some churches in the community, mostly black townships, which is where a lot of HIV/AIDS patients live. He needs to convince the minister of the church that they need to get involved in helping the community, and starting up a HIV/AIDS caregivers group. Only upon the approval of the minister, can Pastor Israel proceed to promote the ECAP program at the church. After getting a list of people interested in helping, Pastor Israel will give a more detailed debrief into exactly what the caregivers will need to do. This usually weeds out a few more people until they are left with the really committed ones.
As part of the training, we held mock counselling sessions outside the ECAP office; Our lovely Zulu classmates (click click click!)
A 3 day training session is organised to provide an induction into HIV/AIDS. Chester and I were lucky enough to be able to go to a number of these sessions. Each church normally sends around 8 people and there are usually about 3 churches at each training session. It was really eye opening to us as all as the people who signed up to become caregivers are unemployed. Instead of sitting around and doing nothing, they decided to become caregivers as they have seen how HIV/AIDS has been afflicting the community. They know that the Government is not able to properly help all these people, so they have taken the initiative to make a positive contribution to their community. I really admire them for being proactive in making a difference.
The funny thing was that the training was mostly in Zulu. They were very gracious and would translate every now and then into English, but despite this, Zulu was actually quite easy to understand in some ways. It is such a colourful language that you can kind of work out what they are saying. Listening to Zulu actually reminded me of my Grandmother speaking Hokkien (although Zulu has substantially more clicks!). Each morning, they would open the sessions with beautiful Zulu Gospel songs. Its so amazing how they can naturally harmonise and sing so beautifully. Their voices are absolutely amazing and so moving as well. At one stage, they all clicked in unison as part of the song – it was great!
As part of the training, they brought in a person who was HIV+ to speak to the class. Lungile Dlamini shared about how she became infected with HIV, and also her testimony about how she became a Christian later. You would never be able to tell from looking at her that she was HIV+. She was so well dressed and well spoken. Lungile said that one of the main reasons she wanted to speak out was so that people’s stereotypes of sick and dying HIV+ people would be destroyed. She was a living testimony that being HIV+, you could still live a normal healthy life. She contracted the virus in 2000, and told us about how people stigmatised her and treated her badly because of it. Hearing firsthand about how prejudice can hurt someone really made us aware of how, as caregivers, they should treat their patients.
As part of one of the sessions, we had to name all the ‘private parts’. This was absolutely hilarious as it was mostly in Zulu, so I picked up some interesting vocabulary! At one stage, someone named a body part as ‘Big Boy’. I’ll let you work that one out for yourself!
After they complete the initial training session, they came back for further caregiver training. This training is more practical and teaches them how to actually care for a HIV/AIDS patient in their home. They are shown how to go about finding HIV+ people in their communities, how to look after a patient in their home (eg feed and bathe them), how to teach a patient to look after themselves and to educate others about HIV.
Lunch at the training session was of course curry! They have a special curry (not pictured) called 'Bunny Chow'. No, it's not made of rabbits, but is actually a hollowed out half-loaf of bread which they pour curry gravy into - absolutely delicious!
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