I am Not a Stone

Sister Dorothy, who is our other nurse in the clinic besides Jenny, is an absolutely outstanding woman. She has a personality that was hard for me to understand at first, but that opened up to me the more I started to understand her and the Xhosa culture better. My favorite part about being around Sister Dorothy is that she has endless little sayings and phrases for every occasion. Some of them are pretty cheesy and ridiculous like saying, “I’m back from the moon,” every time she comes back from her lunch break or saying, “Those people are selfish. They sell fish.”  Every once in a while though, she just drops these little profound bits of wisdom, like she did today. We were talking about all of the stuff happening at Itipini and brainstorming what our way forward would be. I was lamenting a bit about how terrible and unfair the whole situation was and she said, “These things happen to us, not to stones,” meaning that we experience hardship because we are human. To forgo those hardships (and thus, also the joys) would be to deny our humanity and be no better than a stone. In that light, things are left to be what they are and we have no option but to just accept what joy and sorrow each day might bring as it comes. We must live one day at a time and be grateful that we are not stones. That thought has really helped me today to rise above the hardship of it all and be thankful that, for today, we are alive. I am thankful that we are human.

Sister Dorothy (right) with patient Koliswa Qinisile and her son, Anenceba