Freedom Park

5/17/2006
This is Lincoln writing.
Today I went to Freedom park with Kaitlin and Noel, the youth pastor from a church here in town. Noel goes there every week and visits people in their homes with a caregiver from the health clinic there. He brings a small sack of food, talks to the people, and prays with them. This was my second visit to Freedom Park, where we went into peoples homes. We visited 5 homes. Each home has been affected directly by HIV. One of the homes that we visited was a single mom named Sweetness. I’m not sure where her child is living. (Much of the story is lost in translation.) She was so happy and excited to see us. She brought in some makeshift wooden benches from outside so that we would all have a place to sit. She told how when she first got sick she thought that she was going to die, then they took her to the hospice and she recovered enough to come home. She told us that she now feels great and strong and full of hope. She was very frail and thin. Her thin clothes hung on her body as if from a wire hanger. She told us how she used to be a “big lady.” (In the Tswana culture, to be fat is to be healthy.) Before she got sick she was a “business woman.” She would go into town and buy milk and bring it back to Freedom Park and sell it. She told us how she would carry the heavy containers of milk when she was healthy. She brought out a photo album to show us what she used to look like. As I looked at her photo album I was shocked by the similarities and differences of our two worlds. On the one hand, here is a woman, dying in a shack the size of my living room. She has no family to care for her. She has no means of income. She lives a meager existence. Sweetness will soon be a number; a statistic in the reports of AIDS related deaths. My world of automobiles, airplanes, shopping malls, computers, internet, abundance of food, and healthy children, is a foreign world to her. We live 20 minutes from each other, but worlds apart. And yet, despite those differences I looked at her photo album and saw, not a statistic, but a healthy young vibrant woman with family, friends, and a future. I saw her as an energetic young woman posing with friends, family, and her children. I saw her laughing and goofing off for the camera. I saw a life that is not so different from my own. That was shocking to me.
We talked with Sweetness about Jesus and salvation and she said the sinners prayer with us.
We also visited a 12 year old girl that was born with clubbed feet who is mildly retarded. I’m told that she has lived her life laying on the floor of her shack. She is raised by her mother who is an alcoholic and her granny who recently suffered from a stroke. It won’t be long before her granny dies and she won’t have anyone competent to take care of her. She can’t speak, but we could see the joy in her face at having visitors. The care giver that visited with us told us that she is happy to have visitors because no one ever comes to visit. She told us, “When she has visitors she knows that she is loved.” Noel asked me to pray for her and her family. It was an honor to pray for her; as I felt that it was not me praying, but the Holy Spirit praying through me. As I stood in that shack I thought that this was such a vivid example of the scripture, “Whatever you’ve done for the least of these, you’ve done unto me.” This little girl was truly one of the “least of these.”
I'll post some pictures when I get copies of Kaitlin's pictures.