AIDS Awareness Campaign -- Stories from Africa

Concerned Citizens Take Initiative When Government Neglects Rural Area

Victoria Hlatshwayo lives in Embonisweni, a "trust" set aside by the South African government as the traditional land of her people. She lives in a small, four-room cement house on a dirt road in the mountains, which she shares with her husband and six children. She has no electricity and no running water.

One day, while driving from town to her house, she passed the local dump, an area the size of a football field littered with plastic, paper, old tires, and decomposing food. As she drove by she noticed numerous children foraging through the rubbish for scraps of food to eat. She stopped the car to inspect the situation and noticed that some of the children were blowing up what appeared to be balloons. On closer examination, she realized, to her horror, that the children were actually inflating used condoms from the dump and using them as toys.

Seven years later, Mrs. Hlatshwayo still breaks into tears when she explains how encountering these children prompted her to bring a number of them to stay with her family at their house. After the children remained at her house for two weeks, Mrs. Hlatshwayo became curious as to why none of the children's parents seemed to be looking for them. She decided to look for the children's homes in order to assess the circumstances. What she found was houses crumbling around bedridden parents, often dying of AIDS-related illnesses and, in some cases, households led by children as young as twelve.

She decided that the only solution would be to look after the children, to feed them, to clean them, and even to ask the principals of local schools to waive school fees so that the children would be able to attend. This led to an influx of people coming to the house with various problems. According to Mrs. Hlatshwayo, people began to approach her saying, "Mama Victoria, please come, someone has raped a child. Mama Victoria, someone is sick."

This quickly became overwhelming for Mrs. Hlatshwayo, so she called a community meeting to ask other unemployed adults in the area if they would be willing to volunteer to help look after the children. She pleaded with them, "Come with me and help the others, but know that there is no money and nobody will pay us." At first, she was heartened to accept twenty volunteers who helped distribute the workload until it became manageable. However, after some time, several of the volunteers were upset that they were not being paid for their effort and accused Mrs. Hlatshwayo of secretly hoarding money without sharing.

One volunteer, David Pool, a local herbalist in his fifties, explains how he came to be involved with Mrs. Hlatshwayo's orphan project. He was reading his local newspaper one morning when he came across an article explaining what Mrs. Hlatshwayo was doing and how desperate her situation was. When he realized that she did not live far from him, he approached her to see how he could help. In the early years, he operated a small mobile clinic for the children, giving them herbs that provide crucial nutrients and vitamins to boost their immune systems. However, the number of children cared for by Mrs. Hlatshwayo and her volunteers has now reached 196 and continues to grow; this far exceeds the resources of Mr. Pool, who declares, "Now it's too much. As it snowballed, I can't run the clinic anymore." Now sick children must be taken to a distant, understaffed clinic where there is rarely medicine.

Mr. Pool is deeply concerned about the present situation. "The garbage just sits around attracting rats; bodies are buried in shallow graves. Now we are finding cholera outbreaks. I predict a massive f------ catastrophe. Disease and sickness." Despite the fact that a longstanding tradition says that funerals should take place on Saturdays, the appalling increase in deaths means that they are now held every day of the week. According to the director of a funeral home in the area, four years ago there were eight funerals in the region per week. Now, there are fifteen to twenty per day. Corpses are quickly and cheaply buried, often coming to the surface after large rainstorms, after which they are eaten by animals, or left to further contaminate the local water supply.

Mr. Pool estimates that ninety-nine percent of the HIV/AIDS cases in this region are spread through sexual activity. One of his acquaintances bragged about sleeping with thirteen women over the recent four-day Easter holiday. The man did so while knowing that he is HIV-positive, without informing his partners and without using condoms. Mr. Pool explains that some traditional healers worsened the situation by prescribing sexual intercourse with young virgins in order to cure HIV/AIDS. While most traditional healers claim to have renounced this suggestion, many people still believe it is valid. Mr. Pool emphasizes that this has led to rape becoming "the national sport. There have even been cases of men raping six-month-old babies." Mrs. Hlatshwayo adds that two of the children living next door to her had been repeatedly raped by a 42-year-old man, one of them an eight-year-old girl.

The epidemic has become so overwhelming that Mrs. Hlatshwayo must now turn away the new children that are brought to her attention. She currently has six orphaned children staying at her house, three boys and three girls between the ages of eight and fifteen. She is not always able to provide them with food. In addition to these six children, she attempts to provide clothing, medicine, food, and schooling for 190 other poorly cared for children who live elsewhere in the trust.

Unfortunately, it is not a load off of the mind of a social worker when a child reaches the independent age of eighteen. Mr. Pool explains, "When the children we care for turn eighteen they leave us with no skills, minimal education, and with no one to go to. So what do they do? They turn to crime."

Mrs. Hlatshwayo and her volunteers do not receive government assistance. Securing grants for the care of children is notoriously difficult. So, they rely completely on donations from the local community. In the eyes of Mrs. Hlatshwayo, "We get donations from an angel." Mr. Pool cites an example: "One day a woman called me and asked if I was working with the orphans. I said I was and she asked me to meet her in the parking lot of a local shopping center. When I arrived, a woman pulled up next to me in a Volvo, got out, and handed me sixty blankets that had just been purchased. I asked who she was and she told me not to worry about it. She got in her car and left. I have not seen her since."

However, according to Mr. Pool, this is rare. More often than not, people who visit the orphanage and make pledges to help are not sincere. He describes a common situation: "I bring people here and they see the condition of the children and where they are staying. They have their pictures taken with an orphan and tell us that they will give clothes and food, but then when I call them two weeks later they make excuses. I don't bring that sort of people here anymore." Instead, Mr. Pool hits the streets of his community, where he is a well-known figure — it is impossible to miss his devastated, baby-blue pickup truck among the exorbitantly expensive cars of the wealthy area around Nelspruit. He says, "Now I will just go up to these people. They know me. I have been here for thirty years. I will say, 'Look, you are going to support these orphans. Come on, you've got big bucks and I know it. Hand it over.'" It is obvious from the lifestyle of Mr. Pool and Mrs. Hlatshwayo that the money and other donations that they receive will reach the children undiminished.

In June, Mr. Pool and Mrs. Hlatshwayo are hoping to make a connection with a private school that may lead to an influx of donations. They plan to visit Uplands College, a prestigious South African private school situated on a PGA golf course no more than ten miles from the trust. They will give a short explanation to the students about what they are doing in an effort to start a program that will involve each student in seeking donations for the vulnerable children. This type of local support is exactly what Mrs. Hlatshwayo is hoping will alleviate the overwhelming needs of the children in her care. Until it becomes possible to secure government money for these children, she and Mr. Pool will continue scrambling.

If you are interested in helping these dedicated individuals, please contact David Pool in South Africa at 0724853657 or email him at info@zoas.co.za.


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