Living on the Edge

It is truly something to live on the edge. Sometimes it is only as we come face to face with the edge of survival that we truly appreciate the gift of life. As we travel through the region we encounter many who are forced to work with the raw edges that life throws at them and find a way forward:

- take for instance Joyce. Joyce lives in Zimbabwe and has HIV/AIDS. He husband died in 2003. She and her three children struggle for survival. She needs to travel 40 km to the nearest available hospital for ARV's. One Tuesday she left her home at 2pm to arrive at the hospital at 8pm due a breakdown of the bus enroute. Since the Opportunistic Infections clinic closed at 4pm she had to overnight at the hospital until the following morning. On Wed she visited the clinic and received her drugs after which she had to wait until Thursday 3am to catch the bus back home... Given these realities the clinic now gives her 3 months worth of drugs so she doesn't have to take that journey so often. Despite all this Joyce is grateful that she is alive!

- another example of unspoken heroism is the story of Maureen. Maureen lives in Zambia as a single woman. Recently she learnt about conservation farming - a methodology that utilizes natural resources in highly intensive ways to significantly increase crop yield. So she began with a relatively small plot digging the hard ground with a hand hoe. Results were good so she has expanded her plot to at 130 x 40 metre size. All the planting holes are dug by hand. The outcome has been that her food supply now lasts until February instead of December as it used to do. This shortens the time when food is scarce until the May/June harvest and Maureen is so grateful for the assistance she has received in the training from MCC.

- in Zimbabwe we hear amazing stories of children who finally have opportunity to go to school. "My name is Nokukhanya. I'm a girl aged 15 years and I'm doing Form 2. I'm an orphan who has no father...and my mother is suffering from T.B. I now stay with my grandparents and they are not able to pay my school fees. I was going to stay at home when I heard that MCC paid my school fees. Thank you for this. I became glad and very happy to be at school. I will try to work hard. I ask you to keep on helping me with school fees, stationary and uniforms because I want to be educated, so I can help myself and others tomorrow."