Alex project helps Aids orphans
Philippa Garson
17 July 2002
When their mother died of HIV/Aids and their father was murdered, Nosipho, 14, and her little six-year-old sister, Nandi, from Alexandra township, went to live with their unemployed uncle.
Elizabeth, in late middle age, lives with Thandi, her nine-year-old grandaughter, in a one-roomed home in Alex. Thandi's three-year-old sister, Tebogo, has just died of HIV/Aids. Both their parents died of HIV/Aids in 2000.
Maria, 14, and Lefiri, 9, are looked after by their very old grandmother, Busi, in Alex. Their mother was a high school teacher who died two years ago of HIV/Aids. The family is extremely poor.
The names have been changed but these families are real ... And the list goes on.
About two years ago staff from the Alex/Tara Children's Clinic, which treats children and their families for psychiatric and psychological problems, noticed that several of their children had stopped attending clinic.
In doing home visits, they
discovered that many of these children's parents had died. Either their grandmothers were looking after them or they were fending for themselves. This is when the clinic had to broaden its focus to respond to the more urgent crisis of Aids orphans.
In 1994 the Tara Hospital Children's Clinic, under Wits University's Psychiatry Department, set up a unit in Alex to address the lack of service provision in the township. The clinic was established to help children with problems including emotional and learning difficulties, psychiatric disorders, physical, sexual and drug abuse.
Now, however, the clinic has had to step in to meet the basic survival needs of families ravaged by HIV/Aids. Many of their patients are doubly disadvantaged - children with emotional or learning difficulties who have also lost their parents and even siblings.
These children often stop going to school. In their quest for survival, they are vulnerable to sexual abuse and crime.
In most
cases the task of running the home and caring for them falls on ill, ageing grandmothers, some who may also be HIV-positive. "We try to take the financial strain off grannies. And we try to make the children valuable members of their families, not unwanted waifs," says clinic head Wendy Vogel. "Our main concern at this stage is to address their basic needs," she adds. "We can't do counselling unless these needs are met too."
Clinic fieldworkers visit families and help where they can - supplying candles so children can study at night, providing school books, helping sickly HIV-positive children get to school every day. About 50 families are being fed with funds raised by the clinic, which attends to about 250 children. Donor families are linked up with specific families to sponsor their food costs in the clinic's Support a Family Project.
The clinic runs bereavement groups for children who have been orphaned and a "Gogo Support Group" for grannies battling with the loss
of their children, the burden of looking after grandchildren (who may be sick) and their own ill-health. Many of these grandparents are themselves sickly with hypertension and diabetes and in their retirement years have to care for their grandchildren. But strong bonding has occurred between grannies who now support each other outside of the group.
In the children's groups, the children are able to talk about their losses in a safe environment. Often they have lost several relatives - parents and siblings - and many still need to come to terms with their own HIV-positive status. There is no literature yet available to help counsellors address the unbearable losses experienced by the youngsters in their care.
Vogel is adamant however that everything must be done to prevent a situation of child-headed households. "We're saying this is unacceptable. One cannot expect children to look after themselves. Communities are already so impoverished. They cannot take on the burden
of more children."
One way to address the problem is to give support to adult caregivers. "The state needs to provide for them," says Vogel, who believes a possible solution - offering support to both grannies and orphans - is the establishment of a home or cluster of homes where the children and grandparents all live together and support each other and where frail care is on hand for those who are ill.
"In this way, when a grandparent dies we hope to keep the child within a safe community without too much disruption of their lives," says Vogel.
How can children who are not parented become parents themselves? "We may address the Aids crisis, but if we don't address this problem, we will have a new generation of people who are unbonded and who cannot attach. We already have a huge child abuse problem. This will simply get worse," she adds.
The clinic's valuable work is a drop in the ocean in a township of about half a million people, beset by crime,
violence, unemployment and Aids. It needs ongoing donor funds to continue and expand its Aids orphan project.
To find out more about the project, contact Wendy Vogel on 083-6074236 or Rose Letwaba on (011) 443-7875.
Account details for the Alex Orphans Fund:
First National Bank
Commissioner Street (Branch No: 251305)
Account Number: 62026994120
Source: City of Johannesburg web site
Philippa Garson has written for over a decade, on a range of issues, for some of the country’s leading newspapers. The former editor of The Teacher, the national newspaper of the education profession, she was named South Africa's Education Journalist of the Year in 1996.
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