Valley of Tears

(Reprinted with permission, is an article written by Liz Clarke, an Independent Journalist, that was commissioned by "Fairlady Magazine", South Africa as it was printed in their August 2004 issue.)

We will never see her face. We will never know who she really is. We cannot see the suffering or the sadness that shrouds her troubled eyes. But she is Everychild – an icon of a future history that will one day be told with haunting and horrible precision.

For now, Precious (Presh), as she is known to her carers, must cope with the legacy of a present-day political and social ideology – one she may not live long enough to loathe – that has decided that in the interest of cultural and ethnic preservation, orphans of Aids should be returned to “their community” as swiftly as possible.

It is a popular view, one supported by most government child and family welfare authorities, certainly by the department of Social Development, and by many donor-driven organisations. Ask most agencies dealing with abandoned children, particularly Aids orphans, and the standard reply is that they are being cared for by other family members in the community or volunteers who have agreed to look after them.

Yes, they are supervised. Yes, they are monitored.

Presh, who went that route, would, if she were to survive, tell you they were wrong. Her young mother, barely out of school, died of an Aids-related opportunistic disease when Presh was three years old. Disease-free herself, she was a “bright little star” who liked to dance and loved the plastic cow her mother had given her.

She would have been an ideal candidate for adoption. – an Italian couple, who knew of her circumstances were, we are told, keen to give her a new home, but it wasn’t to be.

There were members of her own family who would take her in, as long as they could get the government grant for her. There was also a father who appeared after a long absence and, in fact, may not have been her father at all.

Between them they managed to destroy her innocence and her childhood, and bestow on her a sentence of death. Now a semi-permanent resident (her yo-yo existence between community and care still exists) of a “safe house” in KwaZulu-Natal, Presh has been raped by a member of her community “family”. She is HIV-positive and whimpers in pain most nights when she is trying to go to sleep.

She is not alone and she is not one of a few.

At an Aids/TB hospice facility in KwaZulu-Natal in the Valley of a Thousand Hills, Patience Mvatu, a trained nurse and voluntary hospice worker, takes this issue further. “Here in the Valley you can say we are at the heart of HIV/Aids in this country. More than 350,000 people live in this region, and the disease and mortality rate is so high that people have stopped counting.”

Patience, whose own half-sister died of Aids, leaving behind two young children, believes that the vision of allowing Aids orphans to grow up in their own communities sounds like the correct solution, but in her view is “totally unrealistic” and is failing thousands of vulnerable children.

“I work with the people in this Valley, day in, day out. To me the places I visit represent most poor rural communities where Aids is very bad. The officials aren’t here. They talk a lot, but they don’t see what’s happening.”

Her vision of what “returned to the community” means is in every sense a vision of hell. “I am sorry to say it because I am talking about my own people,” says Patience, who has taken on volunteering duties as extra work above her own nursing job. “But there are many out there who just want the grant money. The Aids orphans who are supposed to benefit from these grants are more often than not abandoned and abused. They often don’t get fed. They don’t go to school. People mustn’t tell me differently, because I see it – daily. Like the other helpers at the hospice, I try to do what I can, but it’s not nearly enough. Yes, there are some excellent parents, but there are too many that are not, and too many children falling through very big cracks.”

Lara Walkden-Davis is a medical doctor with a practice in the nearby wealthy Hillcrest belt, where the Valley people are seldom seen. But the stories she has heard from home-based-care volunteers in the Valley has prompted her to forego one day a week of her own practice to treat the rising number of Aids-related infections, “scrounging” medicines from wherever she can find them.

“In the months I have been doing this work, I have managed to persuade many people to have the rapid HIV tests. Of the dozens of patients I have seen, only three have been negative. But it is the children that concern me the most.

I am seeing the most terrible things. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that we as a country are failing these children. I have seen children orphaned by Aids “returned to the community” and then brought to me a few months later. One four-year-old that I am looking after – fortunately now in care – has been raped so many times that her genitalia are unrecognisable. She is also HIV-positive; so too, is her sister.”

My mind goes back to Presh. Her words still ringing in my ears, even though they were barely audible. As volunteers prepared her lunch – a special soup that wouldn’t upset her delicate digestive system – I asked her what she would like. She answered in Zulu.

“What does she say?” I asked her carer.

“She says she wants her mommy.”