March 2006, Tshepisong, South Africa

By Sheila Killian

Tshepisong. The name is so beautiful, like the safe place at the end of a children’s story, all singsong and full of hope. The reality is a sprawling settlement on the hills outside Rooidepoort, south of Johannesburg, a massive township of government-built bungalows and tin shacks with narrow red dirt roads and almost no trees above shoulder height to give shade from the relentless Highveld sun. It was well into autumn when we drove out there, Felix, Khosa and I, but still hot as an oven.

Felix is Congolese, a short, charismatic man with a beaming smile, colorful clothes, and lots of energy. He originally came to South Africa to seek asylum, and having found it, immediately set about making the place better. He started a group called Power of Women and Children (PWC) to run a daycare centre in Tshepisong for Aids orphans and other vulnerable kids, with a homecare service for the sick.

Soweto Connection, a small, no-frills Irish charity of which I am chair, has been helping with the costs, and so today, since I’m in the country on other business, I’m calling out to meet the volunteers, and spend a day with them.

Felix sings a little as he drives, winding down the window to let some air in, and turning up the stereo. He has one tape, which loops over and over all day, a Tom Jones sound-alike doing covers of American country music. His companion, Khosa, is taller, a rather stern Isizulu woman, dressed impeccably in a black business suit. She navigates the best routes for traffic, and snaps out directions. He disagrees politely, humming along to the music. I don’t know the geography well enough to see if he’s driving his way or hers.

It’s all a little surreal. An hour before I was in my comfortable, air-conditioned Johannesburg hotel, having completed a business meeting, safe in the tourist bubble made of razor wire and complimentary orange juice. Now I’m whizzing through the hot countryside in a pickup truck with two people I’ve only just met, three bags of donated Gaelic football jerseys in the back, and cowboy rock tinkling from the stereo.

We stop off to collect a donation of yoghurt from a local dairy, and soon turn off the tar and bump along the township track. Every junction has a tiny traffic circle, and every traffic circle holds a tiny stall, selling sweets or homemade beer. The daycare centre when we get there is also tiny, comprising one small brick room and a double galvanized shack with the words “Power of Women and Children” loving hand-painted on the side in wobbly black paint.

There’s a mobile number to arrange counseling and screening. I recognize it as Felix’s. The small yard has some wooden and wire toys, a little climbing frame. There’s no sight or sound of a child.

“Go in, go in, you are most welcome here.”

Felix urges me into the low galvanized room. It’s hot and dark, and it takes me a minute to see the place is carpeted with some 45 preschool children having “quiet time” on a dirt floor lined with unfolded cardboard cartons. They weren’t asleep, of course, peeping shyly through their fingers, smiles growing on them like lights being switched on. Within minutes all pretence of rest was gone, and they were up trying on their new “soccer” jerseys.

Over the past few months we’d collected old Gaelic football jerseys from in and around Limerick and assembled them into full soccer strips for township teams. We’d already distributed most of these to local leagues down on the Eastern Cape. These were the oddments, the unmatched and assorted, which the kids seized on like premium brands. Gaelic football is an Irish game, somewhere between rugby and soccer, very parochial, intensely local. It was strange to see these gorgeous young African kids posing and playing in their “Sporting Limerick” and “Kerry Group” tops.

The undisputed leader was Pindile, a little girl with a purple jumper under her oversized Tipperary jersey. She took ownership of the visiting white Mama and introduced me to all her companions, dragging them up before me and shouting out their names and mine in turn: “Wandi! Sheylah! Upauyi! Sheylah! Ntemba! Sheylah! Andreas!”

My digital camera was a huge attraction, and they all demanded to be photographed so they could see themselves on the little screen. “Shoot me! Shoot me!” they cried, jumping and grinning, singing Happy Birthday over and over, the only English song they knew. They were intensely happy kids, and beautiful, their hair styled by the volunteers, looking like young international soccer stars, far too cool for the old jerseys they wore with such pride.

The women minding the children speak only a little English. My Sotho isn’t up to much, so we were limited to smiles and gestures. Felix explained that most of the children were orphans, some being cared for by a Gogo, or granny. Gogos around here end up inheriting many small children, as Aids and TB devastate the middle generation. They can’t care for them all, and the children in the centre are completely dependent on the PWC volunteers for feeding and care, and to prepare for school. There are far too many children for the space, but they find it hard to turn them away.

Felix took me on a round of home care visits with two of the home care workers. Nonhlanhla has recently finished high school, and speaks and writes English well. There is absolutely no local employment. She did a homecare training course with PWC, and now she volunteers fulltime for no pay at all, except the right to share in the food prepared for the children. Every day, Monday to Friday, she and Nelisiwe call to visit about 20 patients in their own homes. This demands incredible dedication, given that they must walk considerable distances between the houses, in the heat of the sun. For this visit, we went in the pickup truck.

We called to house after heartbreaking house, one story piling up on another, all the background details recorded in Nonhlanhla’s wire-bound logbook. Mabele is 47 but looks 75. She lives with her husband, who drinks a little, except at the end of the month when he drinks a lot, and then hides all the food in the house and tries to throw her out. Mabele’s illness is not named. She has sores on her legs, which Nonhlanhla cleans every day. She has been weak lately, and unable to cook for herself.

“You see,” says Nelisiwe, “how she needs us? She has no child of her own.”

Peter has full-blown AIDS, and is open about it, hoping to act as an example to younger men who can still avoid becoming infected. He is very ill. Every day the volunteers make him tea, and perhaps bring Pilani, or e-pap, the fortified maize meal that is so essential when other food is scarce. But mostly what he values is the pots of tea they make.

“They come every day and talk to me, not as a patient, but as a person. As if I was a real person.”

There are women lying on beds in hot tin shacks, the air thick with paraffin, young men fading away in brick built government houses, children left in the care of relatives who care less than they should, or have little enough care to go around all the nieces and nephews who the HIV pandemic is casting up at their doors.

There is unspeakable deprivation. And there is the calm reassurance of Nonhlanhla, calling in with small gifts of food, talking, letting in the light. Her homecare training was partly funded by Soweto Connection. Each three-week session can graduate 20 local volunteers. There is no shortage of work for them.

We drive out to Krugersdorp to collect a donation of vegetables, and Felix stops to buy me a wide straw hat at a roadside stall, feeling pity for my inadequate white skin in this scorching sun. Back in Tshepisong, we have tea in the woefully ill-equipped kitchen of the daycare centre.

All the cooking for 60 children and women is done on a two-ring electric hob by unpaid volunteers. The organization chart of PWC on the wall is unlike any I’ve seen, with “communities” at the top, above the executive board, the donors, the workers, the volunteers. Felix shows me the empty plot of land they have obtained at the end of the block. I’ve already seen the plans for the new daycare and counseling center, with a proper kitchen, cool brick walls and chairs and cots for all the children. All they need now is money.

Eventually it’s time to go. The children dance and shout out their goodbyes. I make the mistake of picking up Pindile and swinging her around, and before I know it, a disorderly queue has formed for picking and swinging. I leave them playing in the dirt, still in their GAA “soccer” shirts, easily the happiest group of children I’ve seen in years.

We spin back to Johannesburg to a rockabilly soundtrack, through the notorious suburbs of Hillbrow and Berea, and Felix drops me back to my Rosebank hotel in time to have a cold beer at the wood-paneled bar. I’m back in the other world.

Earlier that morning I met the tax director of the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants. We’re researching tax reform to make the South African system better foster entrepreneurship, to bring small businesses in from the informal sector so they can expand and create employment. It’s a big project, partly funded by my university, and if it goes well, perhaps there will be work for Pindile close to home, when she finishes school.

In the meantime, if Soweto Connection can support the new daycare center, perhaps Pindile will indeed finish school. I remember her massive smile. I hope we can help keep it there, and make Tshepisong a safe place for her, the beginning of her story.

Sheila Killian lives with her husband and three children on the west of Ireland, where she teaches, writes, and works pro-bono for Soweto Connection. Her work has appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Brevity, The Irish Times, Revival, Aerial, Microphone On, Undertow and The Electric Acorn. She is in love with Africa.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Wednesday, April 18th, 2007 | Email This Post

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