"The bicycle was better - it was faster," says the 90-year-old with a laugh seated at the dinner table of her home in Kgomo Kgomo village in Makapanstad in her home in the North West. It's the house she married into in 1957 after saying yes to becoming the wife of Rantebo Motsei and qualifying as a nurse the year before.
Nursing would become a lens through which she witnessed the limits of the physical body, but also its miracles. It would be her front-row seat experiencing human beings in their weakest moments on a sickbed and also in mortal triumph taking one more unpromised breath. Hers would be a career intertwined with the expression of the rawest of human emotions, behaviours, and actions.
Honing her communication skills and practising tolerance would mark how she chose to approach whoever came to be her patient. Her professionalism and personal attitude raised the profile of nurses and allowed communities to trust and respect"this small, young woman" who arrived as a stranger.
Midwifery, she says, meant she also had to let into the room the older women in the community as well as the village inyanga who would first throw the bones before Motsei was allowed to attend to her patient. Allowing space for customs and hierarchies though was how she ensured peaceful cooperation that enabled her to do her professional work.
Midwifery would dominate her career for nearly 15 years and she would deliver dozens of babies, now in their 50s and 60s. She would also in 1961 start the Mathibestad clinic. They built their own shelves for a makeshift dispensary and held health and cultural days too, she says, as she pages through old photo albums filled with memory and milestones.
Motsei would also become a school nurse serving several schools in her district."The children were easy to work with but some parents could be tight and stiff and some of them would come to me and ask why their children opened up more to me - about menstruation [and] even teenage pregnancy. I would say they should speak softly to their children and let them come with their own views on things," she says.Motsei had six children of her own.
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