Manic Monday

The excitement of Super Bowl XLIV was a fitting start to my Monday this week. It started at the home of Mike and Pam Talley, Living Hope’s volunteer coordinators, who had invited our group of Americans to watch the big game at their flat. The only catch: To see it live, we had to wait til 1:30 a.m., seven hours ahead of the East Coast start time in Miami.

Since it was a close contest until late in the fourth quarter, most of us stayed til the end. By the time I got home, it was 5:30 and I had time for a quick one-hour nap, then I was on the go again. Due to the lack of schoolbus transportation at Red Hill (see below), I had volunteered to help drive kids to school this week. My plan was to be there at 7:00, drop the kids off at 7:45 and be back in bed by 8:00 to grab another few hours of sleep.

As often happens here, there were some delays, and it wasn’t until 7:30 that I left Red Hill for the 20-minute drive back to town, with girls packed into my tiny car. About a mile from the school, we hit rush-hour traffic and were soon sitting in a bumper-to-bumper standstill. Still, it was no big deal, or as a South African would say, not a train smash, At least not yet.

But then, as we were inching along, I heard a commotion in the back seat and two high school girls crying out, “Roll the windows down, roll the windows down.” Pointing at the 4th-grader sitting with them, they said, “The baby has vomited.” Indeed, the youngest of the group had gotten sick and thrown up all over her school uniform. In my exhausted state, my only thought was, “Be patient and this will soon be over.”

But when we arrived at the school, they all got out except the sick one. I had assumed that her teacher would help her clean up, then send her to lie down in a lounge somewhere. But the girl simply sat and stared back at me with a blank expression while one of her mates said flatly, “Take this girl home.”

You can’t imagine how my spirits fell when I heard those words. But I knew there was no other option. The poor girl was really sick and all I could do was turn around, drive back to the rural surrounds of Red Hill, and delay my much-needed sleep by another hour.

Never did I imagine, when toe met leather in Miami almost eight hours earlier, what was in store for me on this Super Bowl Monday.