Orphan, teen, surrogate mother - In Cape Town, it's possible for a girl to be all three

Ian Edelstein, 34, grew up in Loudon and Concord and attended Concord schools. He lives with his wife and son in South Africa. A photographer and videographer by profession, he has been documenting the lives of AIDS orphans in and around Cape Town. In 2005, by UNICEF's estimate, there were 1.2 million South African children 17 years of age and under orphaned by AIDS, and the number is growing rapidly. In this commentary, Edelstein describes the lives of two of them.

Given the circumstances for many people in South Africa, I consider myself fortunate to have a tiny starter home within walking distance of the Indian Ocean. My seaside town of Gordon's Bay, a suburb of Cape Town, is quaint and beautiful when the wind doesn't blow. And when it does, it doesn't just blow, it surges like lightning. In my house, I sometimes feel like a small ship on a stormy sea, tossed about in all directions.

Most South African homes are designed to be as cool as possible in summer, with little concern for insulation or central heating. But the Cape Town winter is wet and raw and five months long. I have space heaters to wage war against numb digits.

Today, with my toes wedged between the fins of a 12-blade electric oil heater, I'm thinking of Noluyolo and Asosule, sister and brother, who are orphans and live alone in a shack where there is no electric heater and little to keep out the wind or the rain.

Noluyolo is 16 and has one year of high school left before who knows what. Asosule is 7 but fibs that he's 8. Both attend school daily. From what I have gathered, Nolu is half dedicated mother and half irresponsible teenager. She and her brother survive on food donated by a nearby church. Nolu and I have been in irregular contact since we met just over a month ago.

I was documenting orphans who receive assistance from the J.L. Zwane Church and Community Centre of Guguletu Township. There are about 18,000 orphans in Cape Town, and the church helps 40 kids. Noluyolo was the first child I met who spoke English comfortably and was unashamed to tell her story.

Their mother died in March 2006. As Nolu remembers it, she had not been ill for long. Nolu has heard rumors that her mother died from AIDS. The stigma of AIDS is too strong for many parents to admit to their children that they are HIV-positive. In some cases, even parents with good jobs and the means to get proper treatment will die in secrecy and denial, hiding all signs of illness until the end.

Nolu and Asosule have different fathers. Nolu has never met hers. Asosule's was involved in the boy's life until he died in a car accident. They have distant relatives in the Eastern Cape, a rural, impoverished area some 600 miles away. Nolu says she doesn't trust those people. Once she finishes school, she will have no employment opportunities there and no place to stay should she want to return to Cape Town. She thinks she and her brother are better off staying where they are, alone in the same shack where she has lived for 13 years.

She tells me there are times when it is difficult, when it's cold and the wind and rain are their only company. They try to scrounge money for paraffin for a crude heater and for cooking.

Winter is the season of the shack fire. People desperate to stay warm use unsafe heaters or bring burning coal in a tin can into their shacks. One shack catches fire, and everything nearby is soon engulfed. A hundred homes or more can be lost at a go.

Nolu admits she has sometimes wanted to kill herself in order to escape. Her brother, she says, is the only reason she has stopped herself. He once asked why they didn't have warm clothes for the winter like every other child, and she could do nothing but cry. They are so dependent on food donations that she refers to the church as "like our parents."

An intruder

But Noluyolo is not the kind of girl who would strike anyone as helpless. To me, she is full of moxie.

I recorded her during our first meeting because I quickly realized she would personalize the orphan experience as no other child could. She paused in her recitation and I thought she was done and panned to show her and her brothers' pants and shoes, well-worn but clean, gleaming in fact. Asosule had just washed the white collared shirts they both wear to school and hung them out to dry. He does this every day, by hand.

The pause was only a dramatic one. Perhaps she was giving me time to collect myself. She continued:

"It's not safe here because one night a man came and was banging on the door. I called, 'Dad,' " - to suggest that their was a father at home - "and he said, 'No, I know

there's no father here. Open up.' And he broke that window there."

Somehow he didn't get in, although only a couple of nails hold each wall together.

When Nolu told me this, I had a moment of clarity. I realized it was just a matter of time before someone did enter, before the cycle of abuse, rape, impregnation and HIV contraction continued. From orphaned child to mother of soon-to-be-orphaned child.

For this reason, Asosule wants to become a policeman and catch the criminals, or "Tsotsis" (the movie Tsotsi won the Oscar for best foreign film in 2005), that haunt them. Noluyolo says she has wanted to become a social worker since before her mother died "so that I can help other kids who are suffering like me."

I asked them what one thing they most wanted. Asosule said, "A bicycle." Noluyolo said, "To change our situation."

'Bantu education'

I would like for Noluyolo's story to have a happy ending, but I don't know how it can.

She will need access to higher education and someone willing to care for Asosule. I have visited them five or six times, usually every Thursday afternoon. My wife and I brought canned food, blankets, clothes and a book on one visit.

On the next, I put Plexiglas into the open windows of their shack and stayed to film Nolu doing homework and making dinner. She prepared a third plate of noodles and beans and offered it to me. I accepted but wished, as we all ate together, that there was an easier way to balance the scales.

When I saw her homework, I understood that she was still effectively receiving "Bantu education," inferior schooling designed to keep the black population under-educated and dependent on menial jobs to serve the privileged white minority. Her math assignment was well below the level of homework my son does in sixth grade at a formerly white school, and even that work looks suspiciously simple compared to what I recall from Concord public primary schooling.

This means it will be difficult to place her in a boarding school if we could find a scholarship and doubtful that she could cope with the workload.

In the short term, I have suggested that we try to collaborate on a project: to make a documentary video about her reaching out to other orphans, helping them to open up, to share their stories and to feel like more than just a tragedy of statistics. In this way, perhaps, she could begin to fulfill her dream of becoming a social worker, helping herself and others.

A way forward?

"Ubuntu" is a Zulu word meaning both humanity and togetherness. It has become a South African ideology, suggesting that people cannot truly become who they ought to be until they have helped another person become what he or she ought to be.

Ubuntu alone will not keep the rain and the wind and the would-be rapists out of Noluyolo and Asosule's home. It won't put food or medicine or a college diploma on the table. It won't bring back their mother or any of the 1 million South African mothers lost to AIDS.

But Ubuntu will show us a way forward. It will explain the urge we feel to understand another's experiences, different as they may be from our own. It will speak to the fact that we all just want to be warm and fed and loved. It will testify to the fact that we are indeed all in this together.

Concord Monitor

Noluyolo's Story