Page 241 - The Diary of A. H. W. Behrens

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1918
The year 1918 brought us the great flu epidemic. The air of
the entire world was simply contaminated. Many died, also in Bethanie and in the whole of South Africa. My Willie was in the Free State and was almost infected when Ernst Lüneburg died there. In Bethanie I had to share the holy communion with a very ill brother of Moruti Maboe and when I left the house I felt that I had infected myself. I became rather ill and had to lie in Waaikraal for many months, but only needed homeopathy and recovered by the grace of God.
In 1917/18 Theodor was also at home without work and started chicken breeding. Everything was started big and ended very small and I suffered a couple of hundred pounds of damages. In 1917 Dr Bornebusch and his family also spent a whole
year with us on Waaikraal. Of course, he paid for everything, caught fish and went hunting. Willie was the manager of a farm in Rhodesia, was dismissed and then got a job in Vrede. Lissy had a small shop in Waaikraal, her customers came from the other side of Sterkstroom.
Besides the above flu epidemic, we twice had smallpox in Bethanie in the early years and constructed a provisional hospital on the other side of Letsopane near the small round mountain for the infected. In all those years we never had a case of diphtheria.