The smell lingers. It's on every spoonful of food, sip of a drink or drag of a cigarette. It's there when you breathe.
It's 6am at Natalspruit Hospital and the few functioning wards are a hive of activity. The meals will arrive shortly, but before that happens floors need to be mopped, dirt collected and nappies need to be changed.
The woman with the intense eyes had suffered a heart attack and was spastic. The previous day a nurse had tried, unsuccessfully, to find a vein to insert an intravenous drip. Now we were trying desperately to roll the fairly large woman onto her side, to remove the soiled nappy and bed linen.
Some are fairly easy. Others make your stomach heave. The mask and gloves do little to create the distance you would like between your patient and the excrement leaking from the nappy and onto the bedsheets. The patient groans in agony when her body is held by unskilled hands.
Hands like Joshua's, who runs a small contracting business from his home in a nearby township. He dropped off his workers at a job before coming through to the hospital to help.
By mid-morning, he was part of a crew of six volunteers making their way through the wards.
"I was thinking about these poor people who are suffering with the strike, so I thought maybe I can help," Joshua said as he lent a hand changing the umpteenth nappy.
Fulfilling a small part of a nurse's daily functions brings newfound respect for their profession.
On Monday, a handful of nurses were on duty, their every move shadowed by security guards.
A woman with blood-caked gums and teeth, and a phalanx of tubes running into her mouth and nose, moans in agony. We alert a nurse and as she passes, we ask what's wrong. She spins on her heels and exaggeratedly mouths the words: "She's going to die."