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THANDANANI: Picking up pieces left by AIDS
Paul Handley saw one charity’s work among children orphaned by AIDS
 Unmarked: the graveyard in the hills above Pietermaritzburg |
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WHY DID Christian Aid invite me and two other journalists to South Africa last week to look at the work of one of its partners, the Thandanani Children’s Foundation? More to the point, with a newspaper to edit, why did I accept? There’s no simple answer, but I think I got nearest to an understanding at the end of the first of our two days there. We’d spent the day touring the foundation’s work, in the company of Nhlanhla (pronounced something like “Clancla”) Ndlovu, the development co-ordinator. With no explanation, he drove us up one of the many hills that surround Pietermaritzburg, above the line of the settlements that cover most of the area. Here at the top were no buildings, but fields of uneven ground. As we got closer, we saw that they were graves, some marked with a wooden cross, others with a cross or a name scratched on to a rock, but most without any identifying marks at all. Our interpreter, Nomfundo, was shocked: most people would have family plots where they would be taken to be buried. To lie here was a sign of poverty and the severance of any family ties. This is what HIV-AIDS has done to many of the poor areas in South Africa. The funeral business is booming, and there is no such thing as a poor undertaker here. But at the bottom end of the scale, death has lost almost all its ceremony. And the neglected state of the graves is an indication of another aspect of AIDS: because unprotected sex is still the chief means of passing on the syndrome, it cuts a swath through the young adults in a community, leaving the elderly and the children to manage without them. In such circumstances, tending a grave is one of the last things on their minds.THE Thandanani Children’s Foundation (the name, pronounced with a hard “t” at the beginning, means “Love one another” in Zulu) has 2050 orphans on its books, and an average of ten more are added every month. At least 90 per cent have been orphaned through AIDS. |
 Nhlanhla Ndlovu, from the Thandanani Children’s Foundation | If the foundation ran orphanages, it could perhaps handle a tenth of that number with the same amount of funding. Instead, it is committed to keeping the children in their communities. Thus it currently supports 751 households spread around the outskirts of Pietermaritzburg and in the nearby rural town of Richmond. Maritzburg is a beautiful town, spread over the contours of countryside that could be somewhere in the Peak District or southern Scotland — at least, if looked at from a distance. The centre of town is a curious mixture of English architecture, including some of the worst bits of the 1960s and ’70s; most of the shops and fast-food restaurants have migrated to various malls dotted around. The commercial centre is surprisingly small for such a large population, but then few of the people here have the means to patronise the stores. |
| Thandanani’s work is in the settlements in the hilly suburbs. Again, they are beautiful from a distance, but a closer look reveals the thousands of shacks that litter the area. Some are built from traditional mud and thatch, poorly drained and high-maintenance, but able to cope with the heat and the cold. The majority, though, are breeze-block with a corrugated zinc roof: solid (though, the week before we arrived, several in a nearby town had collapsed in a storm, raising questions of shoddy workmanship), but ill-suited to extremes of temperature.
The different communities have different characters. Some are almost townships, and well-established gardens surround a few of the shacks, which have been extended and improved until they cross over the line and can be called bungalows. The roads are excellent, too, and some are connected to water and electricity. But right next door are huts that have crossed another line into destitution. |
 On the look out: Faniswa Maduna, one of Thandanani’s 140 volunteers |
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There are other areas, too, where even the concrete roads give out, to be replaced by clay that is probably dusty, although we saw it in its wet, sticky form.
These are the communities, some close, some dysfunctional, in which Thandanani supports its households, attempting to bring them up to the standard of neighbouring households — but not beyond it, for fear that jealousy would undo their attempt to integrate the orphans.
THE PROGRAMME developed by Thandanani is worth describing in detail, not least because the government Department of Welfare has emulated it.
Key to it all is a network of 140 volunteers dotted around the area. These are the eyes, but also the heart, of the foundation. They alert the foundation to any struggling families in their neighbourhood, befriend them, find out their needs, and monitor them throughout the Thandanani programme.
These are people like Faniswa Maduna, whose parents both died when she was a teenager. She is now 30, and works as a nursery-school teacher. This gives her an insight into the home lives of the children. Also, her reputation is such that people now come to the school to ask for “the social worker”. She lives alone with her 13-year-old son, who is sometimes known as “Thandanani”, she says, because he, too, keeps a look-out: “Eh, Mum, there’s somebody who is very needy at school.”
She currently has 13 families on her books. Once a fortnight, the volunteers meet the Thandanani staff, bringing a list of household items needed by their families: cooking or cleaning equipment, clothing, emergency food vouchers. There is not enough money to fund everything; so they have to make a case for each donation.
The idea is that, as families become stabilised, the volunteers can move on and work with others, but Faniswa says that doesn’t really happen: because they remain neighbours, she continues to ask them how they are when she meets them.
“There was a young girl who wrote to me: ‘I wish you could be my real angel.’ She needed some money for a school trip. I didn’t have anything, but I had to try by all means not to disappoint her. |
 Help at hand: Phumzile and Ntombfuthi Ntsangase, with Phumzile’s two children and, in the foreground, their “gogo” — their neighbour who looked after them |
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“If you are not working, life is tough. But you hear how other people suffer, and they need my help.”
THE Thandanani programme identifies four stages. The first stage often involves meeting immediate needs, which usually means food vouchers and the gift of clothing. A key principle is that the foundation helps the whole household, and not just the orphans.
This first stage also includes the often painstaking business of working out who everybody is in the family. The terms “mother”, “grandmother”, and “aunt” are used liberally, and, in two of the households we visited, the orphans themselves had children. The Thandanani volunteer has to identify the prime care-giver, to whom the assistance and funds can be given. This is typically a grandmother or an aunt, but occasionally one of the orphans themselves.
The death of parents can leave things in a chaotic state. We visited two teenage girls, Ntombfuthi and Phumzile Ntsangase, aged 18 and 19, who had had no money coming in at all when a Thandanani volunteer heard about them. They survived because a neighbour, whom they called “Gogo” (grandmother), gave them money for groceries out of her pension.
When Thandanani got in touch, it was discovered that an aunt, who lived near by, was claiming grants for the girls, having said that they were living with her. She gave the girls not a cent, despite their obvious need. The foundation engaged one of their partners, Lawyers for Human Rights, to act for the girls, and now they get R650 a month. (Securing this basic grant was not the end: when Phumzile turned 19, her grant ceased, even though she has two children of her own and another year of school to finish. It has just been restored after a gap of several months. Again, the girls managed because Thandanani fixed them up with a Canadian sponsor.)
Some orphans have no documentation at all, and Thandanani has to arrange a medical estimation of their age. But once they have established their identity, they can apply for a grant from the Department of Welfare, and a school-fee exemption. This is stage two, which also includes registering the children with a clinic, discussing their progress at school, and supplying any further needs, such as furniture.
Once the immediate material needs of the household have been addressed — and this can involve anything up to rebuilding their house — the foundation can concentrate on the other traumatic effects of being orphaned. This is concentrated in stage three.
“People here are reluctant to talk about death with children,” says Nhlanhla Ndlovu, “but children are not so naïve. However, perhaps because of their age, they cannot make sense of what has happened to them.” The children carry a lot of grief and anger, he says.
Part of the programme for the orphans is the therapeutic weekend. The children arrive from school on Friday afternoon and are fed. (Eating is a key component.) In the evening, they are taken to one of the malls for ten-pin bowling, and can choose a takeaway, usually the first time they have done either.
The following two days they play trust games, and then work in teams to talk through their experiences. One activity is the drawing of a “river of life”, to introduce them to the idea of how life sometimes meanders, sometimes rushes by. On one bank they draw the good things that happen (including their births); on the other bank are the bad things. The one we saw showed the graves of the child’s parents.
Another activity is the construction of a “memory box” to contain certificates, a life-history, drawings, photographs, and other things to illustrate the orphan’s background and progress.
The one we saw was a “memory handbag”, donated by an aunt. We examined it by the light of a candle in a dark mud hut. Part of the process is to allow the children to express their emotions. The memory bag contained a child’s drawing of a family tree, with thick black crossings out of the parents and aunts who had died.
Despite the poverty of the surroundings, the family was aware of the value of the bag, and the difficulty of preserving it. One of the aunts thought the Thandanani volunteer should copy the family’s history on to a computer.
The fourth stage in the foundation’s programme is labelled “withdrawal” in its literature, but, as Faniswa had already said, this was not a clear-cut matter. The foundation lays on life-skills training for the family members, including teaching about the risks of unsafe sex, the problems of teenage pregnancy, HIV-AIDS, and nutrition.
Nutrition is especially important when any of the orphans are HIV-positive, since the effectiveness of the anti-retroviral drugs is diminished by poor diet. ARV drugs can be obtained for free in South Africa, but not food.
One of the aims is to prepare the orphans for working life. But South Africa is not immune to the global economic crisis, and work is increasingly hard to come by. This is one of the factors that is turning some of the areas we saw into matriarchal societies: without work, the men can contribute little, exacerbating the problem of absentee fathers. Yet the orphans we spoke to all had ambitions to work in various fields, such as nursing, computers, and tourism, even the ones who already had their own children.
AS THANDANANI’s caseload continues to grow, it needs more funds. This year, its budget was R4 million (about £250,000), though it raised only R3.8 million. During a cash crisis three or four years ago, the 20 staff went down to 50 per cent of their salary, and even that was delayed for a few months at a time. Things are better now, but they still receive only 75 per cent. |
 Memory work: two orphans (right of photo) look at the contents of their memory “box” with their extended family |
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Most of the funding comes from overseas partners. As well as Christian Aid, there are about ten NGOs and charities who contribute, including a Dutch charity and the Belgian Embassy. Among the foundation’s plans are the development of better support programmes for care-givers, and an expansion of the life-skills programme.
Further down the line is the hope that they can replicate the whole programme in other regions; but they are anxious about the commitment it would take to begin afresh.
The most immediate plan is to organise a more discreet testing for HIV. The present system is more like the old VD clinics people have to attend easily identifiable clinics to find out whether they are HIV-positive. Not surprisingly, the take-up of the offer of free testing is low. Thandanani is about to pilot a project in which an unidentifiable nurse accompanies a volunteer and conducts testing at home. In this way, the foundation hopes to begin the fightback against the condition that is providing them with so many orphans, and filling so many fields up in the hills.
In the mean time, new orphans keep coming on to the books. Tandanani doesn’t turn any away.
The Thandanani Children’s Foundation is one of the projects featured in Christian Aid’s Christmas appeal. For more details, visit www.christian aid.org and www.thandanani.org.za
All photos: CEDRIC NUNN/CHRISTIAN AID Determined to remain as head of the household Children build self-respect by rote
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