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A light in the darkness
Her family decimated by AIDS, Hlengiwe Leocardia Mchunu is taking on South Africa's culture of denial about the disease
By Laurie Goering, Tribune foreign correspondent based in South Africa
Published November 26, 2006
In March 2003, when my baby daughter was 3 months old, my husband and I hired Hlengiwe Leocardia Mchunu as our nanny. I liked her right away. After weeks of interviewing women who looked at their shoes when they spoke or mumbled replies to my questions, "Leo" looked me in the eye and told me what she thought. She was smart, confident, relaxed. Our birthdays were a day apart. I knew it would work.
Leo grew up as one of nine children in a remote rural South African village called Qudeni, amid stunning green hills and relentless poverty. Her father, a progressive man, insisted she go to school at a time when few girls there were educated. After graduating from high school, she married a local boy, had two sons and moved to Johannesburg to find work. Now, 20 years later, she and her straying husband were divorced, her boys were nearly grown and she was paying off the mortgage on a modest home.
She had plans. After years spent working in poorly run orphanages, places that pained and infuriated her, she hoped to put away money while working as a nanny to open a refuge for abandoned, mistreated and HIV-positive babies in her home. She would protect the vulnerable, stem the suffering of the country's orphans.
Then her phone began ringing. The calls were from her family, and the story they told was the story of South Africa.
As Leo and I got to know each other--on long car rides, over cups of tea--she told me, little by little, about her family. What she didn't tell me, at first, was about the row of fresh graves at home in Qudeni.
South Africa has one of the world's worst AIDS epidemics, with nearly 20 percent of adults--more than 5 million people--infected with the virus. Each day, 875 South Africans die of AIDS-related complications, according to the United Nations. The impact on families is staggering.
Some spend nearly every weekend at funerals of family, friends and co-workers. Others struggle to care for orphans and the sick. Fledgling government drug-treatment programs, little advertised and often hard to access, are just beginning to make an impact. And in a nation where AIDS is spread largely through heterosexual sex and multiple sexual partners--though sometimes from sufferer to caregiver through contaminated blood and feces--the disease remains such a mark of shame that many people prefer to die rather than seek treatment.
Leo eventually told me that, in the year before I hired her, three of her brothers and sisters had died from the virus, so feared in rural South Africa that almost no one talks about it--not families, not communities, not even the dying.
Vezi, Leo's oldest brother, a strapping high school teacher nine years her senior, was the first to fall ill, not long after the death of his wife. Initially, he told family members he had diabetes. But in his final days, weeping in a hospital bed, he admitted the truth to his sister.
"He said we needed to know he had slept around. He said it as a warning," said Leo, who saw him just before he died. "He told me, 'Tell this to my other brothers. Tell them how painful it is.' "
The advice came too late for Lawrence, a soldier. Six months after Vezi's funeral, Leo got a call that her younger brother had fallen sick and could no longer work. She took Lawrence home, nursed him and tried to accept his vehement insistence that he didn't have AIDS. Three months later, blind, gaunt and crippled with pneumonia, he was dead.
Then it was little sister Thobile. Pregnant with her second child, she began losing weight rather than gaining it. By the time her son was born, both she and her boyfriend were dying. The baby and his older brother went to live with an aging grandmother in Soweto, since Leo's mother, Julianna, already had Vezi's three orphaned children at home.
Leo's siblings weren't the only family members filling graves on a grassy hillside below the family home. Spouses joined them. A young cousin with a baby hanged herself after discovering she was HIV-positive. Another cousin, also sick, swallowed poison.
"We thought this sickness was meant for this family," Leo told me. But by the time she related the story, she was sure the worst was over. She still had five brothers and sisters. They would share the burden of caring for the orphans. They would manage.
Then the calls started again.
One day Leo was sitting in the back yard, laughing with my daughter and new baby son, when I heard her cell phone ring. A short time later she walked into the house, looking unsteady, and asked my husband to make a phone call to Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto.
"Someone just called from the hospital asking if I know anyone by the name of Sabelo Mchunu," she said, shaken. "They say he is dead."
Her younger brother Sabelo had been sick with tuberculosis for more than a year, and he had spent much of the time trying to recuperate at Leo's home. Recently he'd been feeling better and had moved back to his home in Orange Farm, south of Johannesburg. But he'd also started complaining of a hugely swollen gland near his ear. Doctors wanted to operate, but Sabelo had refused. He'd also refused an AIDS test.
"You know men," Leo said. "They never like doctors."
But that morning, as Sabelo crossed a street on the way to work, the gland burst. He fell unconscious to the pavement. Alarmed passersby called an ambulance. Later that day he died at the hospital, and doctors called the death AIDS-related.
Stunned, Leo and I drove silently to the hospital mortuary. As I waited outside with my son asleep in the back seat, she walked past rows of unclaimed bodies piled on the floor, many of them AIDS victims, to identify her brother. When she came back out, we both wept.
Until his death in 2002, shortly before his children began dying, Leo's father, Lucas, was the center of the Mchunu family. Adored by his children and his
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</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>neighbors, he was a creative man, always on the lookout for good ideas. When local children had trouble walking long distances to the nearest school, he built a pair of classrooms on his own land and turned them over to the government. When neighbors went hungry, he started community gardens to feed them. He settled disputes, found ways to solve problems, inspired people with his caring.
Like her father, Leo can't turn her back on problems. Slowly, as her siblings die and her mother ages, she is taking over his role in the family. When family members fall sick, she takes them into her home. When they die, she digs into her meager savings for a casket, a funeral, a van to transport the body home. She scrapes together shoes and school clothes for all the orphans in Qudeni, not just her nieces and nephews, and badgers local schools into keeping orphans in the classroom even if they can't afford to pay school fees. When she runs out of funds, she borrows from me, and borrows again.
Often, after leaving work Friday evening, she climbs into a crammed taxi-van for the five-hour trip to Qudeni just to check on things before turning up at work again Monday morning. She is exhausted and she is exhilarated. She has things under control.
Then she walks in one day looking stricken. Cyril, one of her last two remaining brothers, is sick. He has four children and his wife is already dead. Cyril won't admit the possibility he has AIDS. But the kids, who have seen their mother die, are terrified. They know what's happening. They just don't know what will happen to them.
"It is a house of tears," Leo says. "They are too scared to ask him anything about it."
She begins taking an hour-and-a-half bus ride to their home after work most days to check on the kids, make sure everyone has food. She asks Cyril what should happen to his children.
"You'll make a plan," he says. "My hope is with you."
Within weeks, Cyril is in bed at a rundown tuberculosis hospital outside Johannesburg. He has given up. Leo and I have not. South Africa's government has begun providing free anti-retroviral drugs to people with AIDS, and Cyril is more than sick enough to qualify. I spend all day calling doctors at a treatment clinic in Soweto and negotiating the paperwork to have Cyril transferred to a nearby hospital.
That night, my husband drives Leo out to see him and talk about the drugs. He is rail thin, lying on a mattress on the floor. Painfully propping himself on an elbow, he raises a hand to shake my husband's. He listens to Leo's pitch for the treatment program.
"You can do whatever you want with me now," he says. But when she tells him she'll see him tomorrow, he says, "I don't know."
The next morning, Leo's phone rings. Cyril is dead.
Again, she borrows money: $120 for the cheapest casket, $300 to transport his body home to Qudeni. She and her remaining brother stick his coffin in the back of a too-short van--the only thing they can afford--and tie the door shut with rope to hold the box in. On the way home, police pull them over and ask for a payment to overlook the gaping back door. Leo, near tears, finally convinces them she has no money.
Cyril's kids already have their bags packed when Leo comes to collect them at Orange Farm. "We're going with you," they say. But Leo has more bad news. She can only keep Katiwe, the youngest, with her in Johannesburg. The two older girls and the little boy will go live in Qudeni with their grandmother, far from their friends and their home. The children dissolve in tears.
Like Leo, my father comes from a big, poor, rural family. He was one of seven children, raised on a shoestring farm in rural Nebraska. Money was so tight that he and his brothers often crept into the fields at night and used a long pole fitted with a net to poach pheasants to eat. The first car they owned they won in a lottery. When my mother threw my father a surprise birthday party, soon after they met, he was deeply moved. He'd never had a birthday cake before.
As Leo's brothers and sisters die, I try to imagine the same thing happening to my aunts and uncles. I envision growing numbers of my 22 cousins showing up at our door, my father and mother up late at night, worrying how to make the money stretch.
What I try not to imagine is my own father and mother gone, my brother and sister and I on someone's doorstep, an aunt telling us, as kindly as she can, that we can no longer be together.
Cyril's death changes Leo. She has had enough of the disease killing her family, killing all the families in Qudeni. She is ready to fight.
She calls a public meeting at a broken-down community hall in the village, the first gathering anyone can remember. Men ride in on horseback through the rolling hills and tie their horses outside the hall. Grandmothers walk for hours along trails leading to town, babies tied to their backs and other grandchildren kicking dust behind. By late morning, more than 200 people are sitting in the hot sun outside the hall, fanning themselves and waiting....
Continued.....
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Her family decimated by AIDS, Hlengiwe Leocardia Mchunu is taking on South Africa's culture of denial about the disease
By Laurie Goering, Tribune foreign correspondent based in South Africa
Published November 26, 2006
In March 2003, when my baby daughter was 3 months old, my husband and I hired Hlengiwe Leocardia Mchunu as our nanny. I liked her right away. After weeks of interviewing women who looked at their shoes when they spoke or mumbled replies to my questions, "Leo" looked me in the eye and told me what she thought. She was smart, confident, relaxed. Our birthdays were a day apart. I knew it would work.
Leo grew up as one of nine children in a remote rural South African village called Qudeni, amid stunning green hills and relentless poverty. Her father, a progressive man, insisted she go to school at a time when few girls there were educated. After graduating from high school, she married a local boy, had two sons and moved to Johannesburg to find work. Now, 20 years later, she and her straying husband were divorced, her boys were nearly grown and she was paying off the mortgage on a modest home.
She had plans. After years spent working in poorly run orphanages, places that pained and infuriated her, she hoped to put away money while working as a nanny to open a refuge for abandoned, mistreated and HIV-positive babies in her home. She would protect the vulnerable, stem the suffering of the country's orphans.
Then her phone began ringing. The calls were from her family, and the story they told was the story of South Africa.
As Leo and I got to know each other--on long car rides, over cups of tea--she told me, little by little, about her family. What she didn't tell me, at first, was about the row of fresh graves at home in Qudeni.
South Africa has one of the world's worst AIDS epidemics, with nearly 20 percent of adults--more than 5 million people--infected with the virus. Each day, 875 South Africans die of AIDS-related complications, according to the United Nations. The impact on families is staggering.
Some spend nearly every weekend at funerals of family, friends and co-workers. Others struggle to care for orphans and the sick. Fledgling government drug-treatment programs, little advertised and often hard to access, are just beginning to make an impact. And in a nation where AIDS is spread largely through heterosexual sex and multiple sexual partners--though sometimes from sufferer to caregiver through contaminated blood and feces--the disease remains such a mark of shame that many people prefer to die rather than seek treatment.
Leo eventually told me that, in the year before I hired her, three of her brothers and sisters had died from the virus, so feared in rural South Africa that almost no one talks about it--not families, not communities, not even the dying.
Vezi, Leo's oldest brother, a strapping high school teacher nine years her senior, was the first to fall ill, not long after the death of his wife. Initially, he told family members he had diabetes. But in his final days, weeping in a hospital bed, he admitted the truth to his sister.
"He said we needed to know he had slept around. He said it as a warning," said Leo, who saw him just before he died. "He told me, 'Tell this to my other brothers. Tell them how painful it is.' "
The advice came too late for Lawrence, a soldier. Six months after Vezi's funeral, Leo got a call that her younger brother had fallen sick and could no longer work. She took Lawrence home, nursed him and tried to accept his vehement insistence that he didn't have AIDS. Three months later, blind, gaunt and crippled with pneumonia, he was dead.
Then it was little sister Thobile. Pregnant with her second child, she began losing weight rather than gaining it. By the time her son was born, both she and her boyfriend were dying. The baby and his older brother went to live with an aging grandmother in Soweto, since Leo's mother, Julianna, already had Vezi's three orphaned children at home.
Leo's siblings weren't the only family members filling graves on a grassy hillside below the family home. Spouses joined them. A young cousin with a baby hanged herself after discovering she was HIV-positive. Another cousin, also sick, swallowed poison.
"We thought this sickness was meant for this family," Leo told me. But by the time she related the story, she was sure the worst was over. She still had five brothers and sisters. They would share the burden of caring for the orphans. They would manage.
Then the calls started again.
One day Leo was sitting in the back yard, laughing with my daughter and new baby son, when I heard her cell phone ring. A short time later she walked into the house, looking unsteady, and asked my husband to make a phone call to Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto.
"Someone just called from the hospital asking if I know anyone by the name of Sabelo Mchunu," she said, shaken. "They say he is dead."
Her younger brother Sabelo had been sick with tuberculosis for more than a year, and he had spent much of the time trying to recuperate at Leo's home. Recently he'd been feeling better and had moved back to his home in Orange Farm, south of Johannesburg. But he'd also started complaining of a hugely swollen gland near his ear. Doctors wanted to operate, but Sabelo had refused. He'd also refused an AIDS test.
"You know men," Leo said. "They never like doctors."
But that morning, as Sabelo crossed a street on the way to work, the gland burst. He fell unconscious to the pavement. Alarmed passersby called an ambulance. Later that day he died at the hospital, and doctors called the death AIDS-related.
Stunned, Leo and I drove silently to the hospital mortuary. As I waited outside with my son asleep in the back seat, she walked past rows of unclaimed bodies piled on the floor, many of them AIDS victims, to identify her brother. When she came back out, we both wept.
Until his death in 2002, shortly before his children began dying, Leo's father, Lucas, was the center of the Mchunu family. Adored by his children and his
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</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>neighbors, he was a creative man, always on the lookout for good ideas. When local children had trouble walking long distances to the nearest school, he built a pair of classrooms on his own land and turned them over to the government. When neighbors went hungry, he started community gardens to feed them. He settled disputes, found ways to solve problems, inspired people with his caring.
Like her father, Leo can't turn her back on problems. Slowly, as her siblings die and her mother ages, she is taking over his role in the family. When family members fall sick, she takes them into her home. When they die, she digs into her meager savings for a casket, a funeral, a van to transport the body home. She scrapes together shoes and school clothes for all the orphans in Qudeni, not just her nieces and nephews, and badgers local schools into keeping orphans in the classroom even if they can't afford to pay school fees. When she runs out of funds, she borrows from me, and borrows again.
Often, after leaving work Friday evening, she climbs into a crammed taxi-van for the five-hour trip to Qudeni just to check on things before turning up at work again Monday morning. She is exhausted and she is exhilarated. She has things under control.
Then she walks in one day looking stricken. Cyril, one of her last two remaining brothers, is sick. He has four children and his wife is already dead. Cyril won't admit the possibility he has AIDS. But the kids, who have seen their mother die, are terrified. They know what's happening. They just don't know what will happen to them.
"It is a house of tears," Leo says. "They are too scared to ask him anything about it."
She begins taking an hour-and-a-half bus ride to their home after work most days to check on the kids, make sure everyone has food. She asks Cyril what should happen to his children.
"You'll make a plan," he says. "My hope is with you."
Within weeks, Cyril is in bed at a rundown tuberculosis hospital outside Johannesburg. He has given up. Leo and I have not. South Africa's government has begun providing free anti-retroviral drugs to people with AIDS, and Cyril is more than sick enough to qualify. I spend all day calling doctors at a treatment clinic in Soweto and negotiating the paperwork to have Cyril transferred to a nearby hospital.
That night, my husband drives Leo out to see him and talk about the drugs. He is rail thin, lying on a mattress on the floor. Painfully propping himself on an elbow, he raises a hand to shake my husband's. He listens to Leo's pitch for the treatment program.
"You can do whatever you want with me now," he says. But when she tells him she'll see him tomorrow, he says, "I don't know."
The next morning, Leo's phone rings. Cyril is dead.
Again, she borrows money: $120 for the cheapest casket, $300 to transport his body home to Qudeni. She and her remaining brother stick his coffin in the back of a too-short van--the only thing they can afford--and tie the door shut with rope to hold the box in. On the way home, police pull them over and ask for a payment to overlook the gaping back door. Leo, near tears, finally convinces them she has no money.
Cyril's kids already have their bags packed when Leo comes to collect them at Orange Farm. "We're going with you," they say. But Leo has more bad news. She can only keep Katiwe, the youngest, with her in Johannesburg. The two older girls and the little boy will go live in Qudeni with their grandmother, far from their friends and their home. The children dissolve in tears.
Like Leo, my father comes from a big, poor, rural family. He was one of seven children, raised on a shoestring farm in rural Nebraska. Money was so tight that he and his brothers often crept into the fields at night and used a long pole fitted with a net to poach pheasants to eat. The first car they owned they won in a lottery. When my mother threw my father a surprise birthday party, soon after they met, he was deeply moved. He'd never had a birthday cake before.
As Leo's brothers and sisters die, I try to imagine the same thing happening to my aunts and uncles. I envision growing numbers of my 22 cousins showing up at our door, my father and mother up late at night, worrying how to make the money stretch.
What I try not to imagine is my own father and mother gone, my brother and sister and I on someone's doorstep, an aunt telling us, as kindly as she can, that we can no longer be together.
Cyril's death changes Leo. She has had enough of the disease killing her family, killing all the families in Qudeni. She is ready to fight.
She calls a public meeting at a broken-down community hall in the village, the first gathering anyone can remember. Men ride in on horseback through the rolling hills and tie their horses outside the hall. Grandmothers walk for hours along trails leading to town, babies tied to their backs and other grandchildren kicking dust behind. By late morning, more than 200 people are sitting in the hot sun outside the hall, fanning themselves and waiting....
Continued.....
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