Blog 12: Back at Saint Angela's

I rendezvous successfully with Veronica at Heathrow and somehow, despite the last-minute addition of a Lecky wooden corner seat, all 5 pieces of luggage come in at under 23kg. We dispatch them safely onto the Virgin Atlantic flight, but any feeling of smugness soon evaporates at Johannesburg airport when only one piece manages to turn up in fragile handling. After a minor panic the other bags are all found and stuffed into the hire vehicle, with quite a lot of heaving, mathematical calculations and the addition of Veronica’s husband and his luggage, who arrives on a later flight.

We make for the border, wondering if Lesotho officials will let us through without slapping us for custom duty. Arriving there at 5pm on a Friday afternoon, in thunder, lightning and rain, nobody is interested in us. We breeze through and are soon in the Lancers meeting with Manyanye, Dolen’s man on the ground in Lesotho. Manyanye looked after me last year too, and we have barely greeted him before Joel turns up from Phelisanong orphanage, together with a bunch of people I have only met on Facebook up till now.

Drinks and catching up all around and I become engrossed in a political discussion with my new friend, Nelson, about imminent return to Lesotho of the political opposition exiles, after the failed coup of 2014. It would be nice to think that this event will begin to disperse the clouds of political fragmentation and corruption that hang over the country, but I won’t be holding my breath.

Justice arrives and my luggage is repacked into a taxi which takes me to his mother’s guest house. The roads, already rutted and potholed, have been made even worst by frequent rain and thunderstorms over the past 3 months. When I was here last year there had been 9 months of drought and it was a lot hotter and drier, and I am already regretting not bringing any warm layers, or a rain coat.   

On Monday morning I walk the short distance down the dusty road to Saint Angela’s and it feels like I never left. My arrival has coincided with the annual Irish visit to Saint Angela’s (see blog 3), and the first day of a volunteer social worker, Christine. Of the previous senior staff, the social worker has left, the marketing officer has died and the finance officer has left and then mysteriously returned. Funding has been cut to a shoe string and Sister Augustina remains the only consistent figure at the helm, sailing bravely on in the troubled waters surrounding the orphanage.

I meet Christine and Sister and show them how to assemble one of the water filters (having already watched the assemble video and practiced back in Wales). I hand over the second one to them for them to do and Christine does it twice as quick as me while wearing high heels (the girl has style and is obviously a veteran of the Krypton factor).

Sister gives me the keys to the physio room. I open the door to find it still contains most of the equipment and has also gained a huge set of therapy stairs. The rails haven’t yet been fixed on the stairs and I contact Paul, a local handy man, and ask him to sort the rails and a dangerous hole that has appeared in the linoleum floor. I have received some generous donations from people back in Wales, some of which I have already spent on equipment, but I still have plenty of money left. It is such a relief to be able to pay to get things done straight away, without having to prepare invoices for Sentebale and wait to see if they will be accepted, which was the situation I was in last year.    

Myself and Christine spend the rest of the morning cleaning and organising the physio room. Feeling rather pleased with the results we have time in the afternoon to do some impromptu physiotherapy training. In the middle of this Irish Tom turns up, announcing he is also a physio. He looks around at the torn mats and unusual parallel bars and says “I guess it will be okay when you’ve got the room sorted”.

Irish physio Tom may be a well-built man, but he is in danger of being punched on the nose. He uses some of his Irish charm to win me over and I show him some of the films I made last year. It doesn’t take long for him to become enthused by the kids and their potential and he promises to come back next year with equipment and his skills. This would be a brilliant opportunity for more physio input at Saint Angela’s and I hope it works out.

The Irish are here dancing, entertaining and building, putting in disabled showers, which will give the children in wheelchairs much better access for washing. Irish Tom is helping with the showers and I ask him if he knows that the water has been cut off. He looks puzzled and shocked, but miraculously the water comes on later in the week and for the moment the builder’s efforts have not in vain.

The kids turn up for physio after school and I feel quite overwhelmed to see them all again. Some of them look thinner and more ill than I remember, but the smiles and resilience are the same. The good news is that now many of them have much better wheel chairs than on my previous visit. The bad news is that they have done little physiotherapy in the last year and have spent most of the time sitting in these wheelchairs.  Consequently, some of the children’s contractures have got worse and its definitely time to do some exercise.

I have brought a large inflatable punch bag, which the boys love. The girls are fascinated by the carpeted therapy stairs, and go up and down them continuously, perhaps having not experienced such a thing before. Alex, who has brittle bone disease, decides it’s more interesting to hang upside down from the stair rails and I try not to think of the consequences should he fall.

Alex has deteriorated since I saw him last year. He appears tired and more crumpled in his wheelchair. He has the worse form of brittle bone disease and I suspect struggles to get enough oxygen into his crushed lungs. To try and boost his moral I decided to action a plan I’ve had in mind, to get a Taekwondo teacher in to run a session at the orphanage.  

Last year one of the first things Alex said to me was “Mme Jan, I show you my Taekwondo,” while fiercely punching the air. I tell the children that the lesson is open to anyone, but don’t expect them all to turn up on the appointed evening, together with the care staff and kitchen lady.

The black belt teacher, Mefane looks a little taken back by the rows of wheel chairs and wobbly children, but soon recovers to lead a wonderful session. All the children are punching the air, screaming at their imaginary enemies and venting their frustrations. The sweat streams down their faces, which are etched with painful exhilaration, and for short while they believe that they are as invincible as Bruce Lee. Christine tells me how excited they have all been about the Taekwondo and that they have told her that now the other children at school won’t be able to tease them anymore. I hope they are right. It has certainly been a glorious event and at least for one night the children at Saint Angela’s can dream of fighting back and taking on the world.