The Despair of Ezibeleni

By Hearly G. Mayr
Assistant Director, Bureau for Marketing and Development, ADRA International

If you could drive two hours from East London away from the temperate waters of the Indian Ocean over the green pasturelands of the Eastern Cape in South Africa, you would run into Queenstown, a small town surrounded on all sides by sharp-crested ridges and set in the middle of a largely prosperous farming district. Then, heading east for a couple of miles beyond the town limits, you’d find yourself staring at the empty streets of Ezibeleni Township.

Ezibeleni Township, in Eastern Cape province, South Africa, reflects the challenges that many communities face in this developing nation.

The place resembles some of the lonely hamlets scattered in the desert areas of central Nevada and southern Arizona, the difference is that here the neglect is in your face. Piles of rubble and trash near the road go uncollected. Little children play with thrown-away tires. Winds swoop down from the hills picking up dust and plastic bags, taking them twirling from empty sandy lots past long rows of cinderblock homes into wire fences.

It is here that two years ago Cecilia Peter and her husband, Edmund, both retired and living in Ezibeleni, talked about doing something to help their neighbors. People were dying of AIDS and no one seemed to mind one bit, at least not in any visible way. Cecilia had already undergone training as an ADRA HIV/AIDS Trainer of Trainers (TOT) volunteer and was busy teaching in different neighborhoods, but, as she recalls, there was so much more that she was ready to do. What came of their conversations was the Hopewell Health Services Center, a small building in the back of an enclosed lot where people could have access to food, learn about HIV and AIDS, and, as Cecilia explains to me, find hope in the middle of hopelessness.

“We have so much love for Hopewell,” says Cecilia. It is that very love that drove her to start this project from nothing at all, and with the help of ADRA and some local partners, expand it to the point that now an average of 115 people come to the center every Tuesday and Thursday.

Well before people begin to arrive at Hopewell on this day, Celicia, Edmund, and five other volunteers prepare for the day ahead. In two black cast iron pots that sit over an open fire, Gladys Kwanini, a neighbor, and the one who will later lead the task of distributing the meal of the day, stirs a hefty amount of beans and crushed mealies, or samp (corn flower) using a long wooden spoon. The pots are left to boil for hours on end, late into the morning. “This is how we make Umngusho,” says Gladys. When the food is done boiling, she mixes the beans and samp into a thick, hearty concoction, which she will serve one scoop at a time to every person that comes to the center.

Cecilia Peter, head of Hopewell Health Services, counsels Ezibeleni residents on how to cope with HIV and AIDS by following a healthy lifestyle.

In a backroom, Cecilia, who retired after working for many years as a nurse, retrieves a stack of detailed files from a desk—a door laid flat and fastened to wooden legs—that she keeps on every person that comes seeking advice for any number of afflictions. About four of every ten people who sit across her desk at Hopewell, she says, are HIV-positive—young girls, older women, men, even children. And in every case, she must find the right words to comfort them. This is why she’s here. “The biggest challenge,” says Cecilia, “is to educate people so that they know about HIV. And if they are already infected, to show them how to live with it.”

Nothing could be more important and pressing in Ezibeleni. Here, like in much of South Africa and other neighboring nations, AIDS is wiping out entire generations, much in the same way as the Black Plague did in Europe during the late Middle Ages. In South Africa alone, at least 5.5 million people (there are between 33.4 and 46 million cases worldwide, the United Nations estimates) are already infected with HIV. If you pause to consider these numbers, you might actually be horrified.

At noon, a volunteer opens the main doors to Hopewell and a short procession starts to pass in front of the reception desk where a volunteer writes in a ledger the names, addresses, and family size of every person that arrives. These are the details that Hopewell wants to know in case Cecilia or someone else has to pay a home visit to provide assistance.

Gladys sends two men outside to fetch a pot full of Umngusho. It is hot to the touch, so the men walk briskly, then place it on the floor. Gladys sits in front of it holding a ladle in one hand. There are no lines. Everyone is seated. Taking turns, every person walks to the steaming pot and stretches out a plastic container to catch a full scoop of food. Sometimes, it is four scoops. Other times only two. How is this fair? I ask Cecilia. After Gladys scrapes the last of the Umngusho from the bottom of the pot, Cecilia tells me: “It depends on the size of the family,” she says. “If a mother has three children, she gets four scoops: one for herself and three for her children. It’s too bad that it is all we can give them. We don’t have more.” But for some in the room, the food they get is equivalent to half, because they save the rest for the following day when they will be unable to find anything to eat.

Poverty is nothing knew to Ezibeleni. In fact, the township has seen varying degrees of it ever since the first homes rose on this wind-swept plain in 1974, when black South Africans were not allowed to live, only work, in white-dominated Queenstown. In order to pursue the policy of “separate development,” the apartheid-era government of the time dictated that, due to its location on the map and the predominant Xhosa ethnicity of its people, Ezibeleni would belong to Transkei, one of ten fragmented batustans, or homelands, scattered across South Africa. While this seemed like a good idea on the surface, promising to give blacks a place to live and prosper independently, in reality Transkei and the other homelands were akin to the Indian reservations created in the mid-1800s by the United States government, where residents had little, if any, opportunities for self advancement. Over several decades the erosion of rights and opportunities left a hole so deep that many communities, including Ezibeleni, struggled to climb out of it on their own. Then came the AIDS pandemic, putting the proverbial nail in the coffin in the lives of so many people.

Lindiwe Norexe is 56 years old. For some time she worked at a nearby factory making jackets. But she would get sick on and off, and that didn’t sit well with her employers. So they fired her. She struggled to find food for herself and her four children. That’s when she decided to send them to stay with her mother. “That was the only safe and stable place for them,” says Lindiwe. Not too long after that came the attack. As she talks, one can see that the memories of that day have not left her mind. And, quite likely, never will. Lindiwe speaks painfully of how two years ago five men raped her. This wasn’t the first time that this kind of violence happened to an older woman here. She felt bewildered and powerless. It seemed to be the end of everything. When she went to the local police station to report the crime, the police told her to go to a local clinic to get an HIV test to rule out that she was infected before the rape. But when the results came back, she was crushed. The report said that she was HIV-positive. She was going to die, she remembers thinking. “I cried when I got the news.” How could this be? What to do now? What would the children think? These were the questions that tormented her the following days. “It took a month to accept the truth,” says Lindiwe. Her voice breaks and her deep brown eyes flood with tears. She wipes them off with the cuff of her coat. “I want to live for another 10 or 20 years. But I’m doubtful.”

In Ezibeleni women seem to bear the brunt of the HIV and AIDS pandemic. Perhaps it is just an ugly, unfair coincidence or a passing illusion. Although statistically this disease strikes across gender lines with equal efficiency, leaving behind a sense of chaos and permanent loss in those families it touches, it is usually women who come to Hopewell, pulling their children by the hand, looking for a reprieve from the constant struggles of life in the township. One cannot understand, only observe, how a mother confronts her own mortality and sometimes that of her children when the end is thrust upon her in this manner; the swiftness and certainty of this disease can be demoralizing.

“I was afraid of dying,” says Siphokazi Dumani, 22, holding her 15-month old daughter Liyema, her only child, on her lap. Staring out the window toward the hills, she appears stoic and sad at the same time.

Siphokazi, like other young women in Ezibeleni, contracted HIV from the person she thought she could trust: her child’s father. When she went to the hospital in Queenstown to deliver Liyema, she didn’t know she was carrying the virus, although by then something was making her ill. That’s when the hospital staff counseled her to get tested—as a precaution, they told her. And she agreed. When she heard back from the lab that her blood was positive for HIV, she felt numb. “There’s no life for me. There is no hope after that,” she thought. She went home and cried for days. “I was useless.”

Since then Siphokazi has tried to look for the good in things. And that seems to have helped her understand that life is not over, that there’s a reason to keep looking ahead. “I was very happy when I found out my daughter was negative,” she says, after little Liyema’s blood work came back HIV-free. Four months ago Siphokazi got a job with a cleaning crew at a hospital in Queenstown. It wasn’t easy getting hired, since she had only finished schooling up to grade eight. But now the extra money allows her to buy some essentials, which she could only get before with her parents’ help. Each day she gets up at four. Sometimes, before she walks into the dark to catch a bus to town, her daughter wakes up and asks in Xhosa, “Mom, where are you going?”

In 2003, Siseko, 8, and Sikelela, 11, lost their mother, Luyanda, to AIDS. Now they live with their grandmother in Ezibeleni Township.

At the back of the building, Cecilia invites one person at a time to speak with her in her office. The visits are short, about 15 minutes, but she makes sure that every person leaves feeling a little better and well informed. “I tell them that they must take care of their bodies,” she says. “They must eat fruits and vegetables and do plenty of exercise.” The idea, of course, is to counter the effects of HIV and AIDS, of weight loss, in particular, to avoid the sickened body from drawing energy from its reserves, namely body fat and protein from muscles. This would not be immediately obvious, unless someone like Cecilia described it, patiently, to you.

“I like the teachings and the patience they have for us,” says Lindiwe. “People here talk nicely. They give you hope and peace.” Lindiwe visited Hopewell for the first time a year ago after a friend who was also HIV-positive invited her to come. She talked to Cecilia about her attack, and of how she was afraid of dying. “Ever since I came for counseling,” she explains, “I’m no longer bewildered.” Likewise, when Siphokazi came to Hopewell, still uncertain about what kind of life she would have, and how long she would be able to spend with her daughter, Cecilia and the other volunteers tried to show her ways to stay well. “Hopewell told me that if you want your body to be strong,” says Siphokazi, “you have to eat healthy. Now I see my future going on.”

That’s exactly how Hopewell wants its guests to feel. Cecilia, in her wildest dreams, knows the center will grow to accommodate many hundreds more. She wants all of Ezibeleni to know that the center is there—to offer more counseling, healthy food, and even rapid HIV testing. This is just the beginning, she says.

Walking out the door, as I put away my notes, Cecilia says. “My husband and I know personally what HIV can do. We lost our daughter and our son-in-law to this disease. Now we must care for our three grandchildren and look after their education and health.” Then she says, “We want to fight so that if possible no one dies of this.”




Site Map

Directories

Contact

Other Features