Angella Johnson : VIEW FROM A BROAD
Sophia Jardim was trawling the aisles of her local supermarket, one of her “children” precariously balanced on her hip, when a woman approached and lobbed a gob of spit at her.
It was just another in a string of unpleasant attacks this 43-year-old divorcee has had to endure in the three years since she started filling her modest Mpumalanga home with abandoned black children, some of them dying of Aids.
Jardim says that most of the white residents in Barberton, a picturesque sub- tropical lowveld town nestled in a valley an hour’s drive from Nelspruit, have treated her and the children in her daily care like pariahs.
“They can’t understand why a white woman would want to look after sick and abused kids,” she complained. “I have found it difficult to get any charitable help and some have been positively obstructive.”
When she asked a prominent businessman to help fix her broken bathroom he told her pointedly: “If they were white kids I’d put in a new basin, but for them, I won’t even give you a second-hand one.”
Another man recently stopped her on the street and said she was crazy. “Those kaffir kids will one day cut your throat, can’t you see how they are killing the farmers?” he declared.
Shunned by the municipality (her water and electricity have been cut off for non- payment four times) and several local charities, Jardim has struggled to feed and clothe the eight children currently in her care. So she has decided to seek funding from further afield.
I was touched by her story after learning that a letter she sent to a national Sunday paper last month elicited the response that “everyone is now tired of stories about Aids”.
Well, I don’t think there can ever be too much news about people suffering from HIV/Aids – especially when they are children. This is not a seasonal disease. So I made the four-hour journey to visit Jardim’s rented four-bedroom railwayhouse on the edge of the old mining town fenced in by mountains.
The red brick building is sparsely furnished with a clash of second-hand furniture, its wooden floors, bare and unpolished, littered with broken toys. There were no signs of luxury, but laughter filled the backyard, where brown-eyed children with matted hair charged around the huge garden. I was reminded of the rhyme about the old lady who lived in a shoe.
Jardim, a vibrant red-head, was nursing Emma (3) who has Aids. “I don’t think she’s going to make it to Christmas because her system is shutting down. She’s going the same way as my Pele and it’s breaking my heart.”
Pele was the baby boy who started her mission of love nearly four years ago when Jardim, who had just ended an eight-year relationship, approached the local hospital looking for some way to help out.
In the children’s ward she spied the 18- month-old baby, who had been dumped there when he was only three months old. His mother and father had died of Aids, leaving their HIV-positive son unwanted by a rural black community that still believed the disease was a sangoma’s curse.
Doctors told Jardim that Pele would not live beyond six months. She took him home, cleaned up his sores and watched him grow into a boisterous toddler who played and slept with her own three-year-old grandson, Daniel.
He died last April, nearly three years later, as have two other babies in her care. Her voice became hoarse with emotion. “It’s like losing one of my own.” She has four grown-up children.
Does this mean she would be reluctant to take another HIV-positive child, I asked.
“I will take any child in need, as long as there are no parents waiting in the wings to take them away. I could not bear to go through that.”
So why did she choose this path?
“Some people think that I do this for the money or some other personal gain,” she replied. “But I can’t even live off what the government gives me for them. I do it because they need someone to love them.”
Jardim supports herself by making and selling pottery and dark, brooding artwork from recycled goods. “Everything that anyone throws away, I make useful and beautiful again.”
(Which, I suppose, is also what she does with these broken and abandoned children.)
She receives R350 each from the Department of Welfare for four of the children in her care and has started mending torn hospital linen for extra cash. “This money is nothing when you consider the nappies needed for babies with HIV. The washing machine is going all the time.”
Not all her young charges suffer from HIV or Aids. Most, like Katie (3), who was left on the banks of a river at three weeks old, have been abandoned or sexually abused.
Jardim has started adoption procedures for Zodwa, a 13-year-old Swazi girl who had been illegally sold by her mother into domestic slavery to a South African couple when she was 11. The child was repeatedly raped by the husband, who is serving a seven-year sentence for the assault.
“Because she’s an illegal, the authorities wanted to deport her after she had been with me for 14 months. But Zodwa doesn’t even know where her parents are. In any case, they can’t have cared much if they sold her in the first place. I won’t let her be thrown on the rubbish heap again.”
Another child (8)had been raped by her father. No one knows where her mother is. Yet another, Moosa (5), was neglected by his grandmother who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. “I just want people to understand that these children have a right to receive love and to accept that I am willing to provide it.”
Despite the desperation of her own needs, Jardim shares any donated food and clothing with Kenny and Betty Mahlangu, a Christian couple in Nelspruit who are looking after eight orphaned children in a two-bedroom house.
Kenny Mahlangu, a 41-year-old pastor with the Unity in Christ Church, sees it as a calling to reduce the number of children roaming the streets and perhaps turning to crime – youngsters like Sibusiso (2), who was dumped by the roadside at only three weeks old.
“They come to us physically and emotionally broken,” said the pastor. “We see them as gifts from God, needing our love and protection, but it is very hard to survive on the R350 a month we get for each one.”
But the picture is not entirely bleak for these carers, who believe it is also their role to change public attitudes. Jardim said she has seen a trickle of change among some neighbours in recent months.
The wife of the businessman who refused to help with her broken bathroom covertly makes clothes for the children. And the woman who spat at her was thrown out of the supermarket after another customer witnessed the incident and complained to managers that she was carrying an animal – which is against store policy.