“The donations help pay for the clinic that we go to. We actually help with the clinic so you are paying for the supplies which are very meager, I mean I used to be a nurse and this is the most non-sterile place I have ever been and then you are soaking these kids, scrubbing them and then the nurses take either a safety pin or little razor or both to dig out this pocks, I mean it is like a little under the skin blisters is what it looks like, but once you pop that and bring it out, it leaves a divet in the foot where it was. They are a live parasite that will continue to lay eggs and spread in their feet if you don’t get them out. And as we were washing their feet, I am sitting next to a local woman who helps at the clinic and I said ‘how did these kids get these, why can’t we prevent this?’ She said it is because their parents don’t care. These are little kids, elementary age and they are basically having surgery on their foot and there’s no parent around and I am like ‘You know, if my kids had a problem and I take him to the doctor, I don’t just send them’ and she said it is because their parent don’t care. I asked ‘what do you mean?’ she said if their parent cared they wouldn’t even get jiggers. Their parents don’t bathe them, they don’t take care of them and that’s why they get these jiggers.
But they are so poor and most of them don’t have shoes. So this is the kicker, part of the money that we pay, it’s $12 a kid to have this done. They get a pair of socks and a pair of shoes. But they’re like the school uniform pair of socks, the big, long, grey kneehigh that would drown most of the little kids like they don’t have the little kids’ sizes, I guess all you get is like the size that would fit me and then you give them these shoes that they’ve never been wearing because they’ve always been barefoot and you put them in a tight paten-leather black shoe. Before the day was over we went back outside as we had finished up and we couldn’t even do them all, there were still over 100 of them waiting to be done but we were just out of time and out of shoes and so they told them they’d have to come back the next time they were doing another clinic and there is a lady there that does them weekly. We just help her when we go. Anyway none of them have the shoes on anymore, they were barefoot again and I said ‘what the crap, where did all the shoes go that we gave them?’ and she said ‘They went home and take them off and then they’ll come back hoping we’ll give them more.’ She said most of them won’t wear them, they need them for school but they won’t wear them except when they go to school.”
