October 26, 2007

This morning we were awake and downstairs of Langerry to catch our van at 8:00am to leave for Post Retief in the frontier of South Africa. We were riding high class with a 23 passenger van (compared to the 14 person Kombi we generally travel in!) each of us could spread out and actually sit comfortably…except for the broken air conditioning and the excessive heat! We stopped in Grahamstown to visit the African Musical Instrument Factory. We were able to see how instruments were made that are traditionally used in South Africa when playing music. We listened to four men play the marimbas and they put on a good show for us! We left Grahamstown and went to Bedford to see the gardens that are on tour. We met two of our hosts for the weekend, Mine (pronounced Mi-nay) and Colleen. We walked through the gardens and all of the flowers were so beautiful! I took tons of pictures for Mom to enjoy! After we went to the gardens we went to where there was a cricket field that held a championship game. We were able to walk onto the field and they we stopped in the pub (a converted old mill) for a glass of wine for R5 (or roughly $.75). After our tour of the grounds, we went to the farms. They were quite a ways out of town, we drove through the mountains for an hour on gravel roads until we arrived at Mine’s house for a braai. We met the other three families who we would be staying with (Colleen’s family, Eleanor’s family, and Michelle’s family). As we were waiting for supper to be served Colleen came into the sitting area that we were in and asked if anyone knew anything about burns, because one of the farmhand’s daughters were burned by the bonfire. No one made an effort to get up and go to the kitchen, so I went (despite my lack of experience with burn patients). I got into the kitchen, thinking that it would be a minor burn that a cold compress and Tylenol could cure…I was wrong. There was a thirteen year old girl shaking and crying on a bench in the entrance to the house, with burns and blisters all up the inside of her right leg, starting at her ankle and going up to her thigh and on her left ankle she also had many burns. The blisters were very large, and some were the size of an egg. Carrie came back into the kitchen and she went to get Denise. Denise came, while Carrie and I went to find gauze and dressings to cover the open blisters to prevent infection. We found gauze, surgical tape, and an antibiotic ointment to put on the open sores. Denise dressed the wounds and Carrie and I handed her things and rubbed the young girl’s back. She didn’t speak English so we did the best to calm her. We gave her meds for the pain and tried to help her relax. The ambulance came an hour later and took her to the hospital in Adelaide.

We spent the rest of the night dancing (Kasy and I taught everyone the Cotton-Eye Joe dance) and eating a delicious dinner with amazing dessert! Finally, around 11:00 we piled into Colleen’s car and we went to our “home” for the weekend. Laura and I shared a room (Robert, Colleen’s 21 year old son was kicked out of his room for us to share) and we literally fell asleep as soon as our head hit the pillows! We were so darn tired!