Suzan Chala
South Africa is soon to get its first Aids village the second country after Botswana to provide a space for people with the deadly disease to live out the rest of their lives as productive people.
Construction will start this month in Roodepoort outside Johannesburg on land donated to an interdenominational ministry, Sparrow Ministries. The organisation is not associated with any church or government and gets funding through donors and sponsorship.
It founded a hospice, Sparrow Nest, in 1992 to support destitute, terminally ill Aids patients. It started with four patients and is now caring for 12 adults and 18 children.
The hospice operates from a former residential home in Roodepoort. The lounge of the nine-room house is decorated with a painting of a mother comforting her child, blue sofas and a computer.
The youngest resident is a three-month-old baby who sleeps in a bedroom containing two single beds and a cot. All day the baby boy is passed from arm to arm, spoiled rotten by the older children and adults at the hospice.
Another bedroom has five beds where terminally ill patients lie all day. The yard at the back is filled with garden furniture, toys, a dog and playing children.
In the eight years that the hospice has been operating, more than 600 patients have died. To remember them, the staff put little metal “sparrows” on a tree with their names, date of birth and date of death. The staff are compiling a “book of memories” to ensure their patients will never be forgotten.
Reverend Corine McClintock, who runs Sparrow Ministries, says its first patients were young homosexuals suffering from a relatively “new” disease. Their relatives could not cope and abandoned them at provincial hospitals, who needed to discharge them.
“Obviously, over the years this problem escalated. Shortly after we lost Martin, Sean, Victor and Rudi, we took in an African girl, Josephine, who had been a prostitute in a mining town.
“She was desperately ill and sitting in a long corridor in the apartheid, non-European hospital. Her sitting there in a blanket that was more a hole than a blanket conjured up the famous picture of a young child in Sudan with a vulture hovering over her.
“She lived with us for a few months, picked up weight and was living testimony to loving nursing care.
“We wanted to show the hospital where she came from that sometimes illness in terminal Aids is reversible, and that Aids patients can live and die with dignity.”
Sparrow Nest offers medical, psychological, social and spiritual care services through a multi-disciplinary team of qualified personnel. Most are volunteers. They function primarily at the hospice, but because of limited accommodation they have trained home-based caregivers for out-patients.
“I’ve been here for nine months now. Some of my family members have abandoned me. I appreciate what they are doing for me here the love and support they give is incredible,” says one of the patients, Suzan Vanschalkwyk.
Because of the increasing number of people who need its help, Sparrow Ministries is building the Aids village. There are 60 children on its waiting list for accommodation.
“There is need for a big-scale caring facility,” says Lynette Nel, a psychologist at Sparrow Nest.
The Rainbow Village is about to be built on a 6,4ha property on the Paardekraal farm in Maraisburg. The land was donated by the Western Metropolitan Local Council.
It will provide a 200-bed hospice facility, a day-care centre, a clinic, a farmyard, a church and a laundry. A refreshment centre, which will target people who visit the adjacent Cecil Payne park, will help raise funds.
There will be a training centre to train more staff and volunteers for home-based care and as counsellors. It will provide a family structure parents will not be separated from their children, and patients who don’t have children can take care of orphans.
“Patients whose children will be orphaned will have peace of mind knowing that they will be placed in families that can care for them after they die,” says Nel.
The village will create work opportunities for active patients through income-generating projects.
“Most of the adults are breadwinners, and can therefore continue to support their families,” explains Nel.
The estimated cost of the village is about R4-million, of which Sparrow Ministries has raised half.
“We will start by building the hospice and all other things will follow,” says Nel.
It will cost Sparrrow R125 to pay a nurse for a shift, R850 to train a care-giver, R75 to train a patient, R200 000 to build a cluster of five igloo-shaped hostels and R125 000 to buy a mobile unit for home-based patients.
Members of the public can “adopt” a child at Sparrow by offering to pay for the cost of accommodating and caring for them. Only 40% of the children are orphans, the remainder have been abandoned at local maternity wards and, in four instances, in dustbins.
One of the children who will live at the Aids village is Nomsa (4), who wanders around the hospice asking one question: “Where is mama?” She says she wants to go to heaven so she can join her mother.
Nomsa’s mother was found dead recently in her Doornkop shack. A concerned neighbour called the police when she realised that there had been no movement from the shack for days.
Nomsa was found sleeping on her dead mother’s breasts. She had spent two days alone with her mother’s corpse, without food to eat.
“Her grandmother contacted us. She is a pensioner from Swaziland, and does not have the means to support Nomsa,” says Nel.
The little girl now lives in an unfamiliar environment, surrounded by strangers. She wakes up every morning hoping to see her mother, but all she sees is a couple of ill and tired adults, children whose health conditions change from bad to worse and the nurses who take care of them.
Her daily activities have changed from playing and running around, to lying on a bed and clinging to a doll as if her life depends on it. She excitedly raises her head every time someone walks into a room, but her smile fades when she realises it is not “mama”.