Twelve-year-old Promise Sibitane is a mournful figure as she stands at the entrance of the Thembalethu home-based care centre.
She stares in the direction of her mother’s old house near Schoemansdal on the border between Mpumalanga and northern Swaziland. “If I had a chance to see her again I would ask her to come back, because we miss her so much,” she says.
Sibitane, her sister and two brothers lost their father to an Aids-related illness when she was five. Shortly afterwards her mother left to find work in Johannesburg and never returned.
Until recently the children lived in their grandmother’s shack with their aunt’s family. No one in the extended family of 15 was employed and they relied on the grandmother’s pension of R540 a month for support.
Sibitane was forced to drop out of school. “In 1996 I passed grade one, but there was no one to pay my school fees the following year and my grandmother told me I would have to stay at home,” she says.
Help arrived when volunteers from Thembalethu (Our Hope) heard about the family’s plight and took Sibitane and her siblings to live in a house about 6km from the centre.
The Department of Agriculture and Land Affairs donated the house last year and Thembalethu employed a housemother to care for the 13 children who live there. The facility is stretched, however, with only two bedrooms and three mattresses, a sitting room with one sofa, a kitchen and one toilet.
Thembalethu was never intended to be an orphanage. The centre was established three years ago to provide home care to people with HIV/Aids.
Everyday a dedicated team of 51 volunteers feed, bathe and give medicine to about 400 terminally ill patients in eight surrounding villages. Their help is a boon in the rural areas south of Malelane, where medical resources are scarce and the limited medical staff and facilities at local clinics are already overburdened.
The scourge of HIV/Aids has left about 1 600 children without parents. These kids often live in mud huts or shacks without adult supervision and with no money for food or education.
Thembalethu is doing what it can to take care of the orphans’ basic needs and to see that street children are given the chance of an education.
“We take basic supplies such as maize meal, soup, meat, soap and washing powder to their homes once a week,” said Thembalethu coordinator Bridget Moyane.
The project also managed to round up about 500 street children and registered them at schools. It initiated a transport scheme to ensure that the children attend classes.
Lihle Manana (17), of Jeppes Reef, bordering Swaziland, was one of the 500. The teenager had already missed a year of school before Thembalethu stepped in to get her re-registered.
Manana, her older sister Sibongile, (19) and her two younger brothers, Thobani (14) and Nkosinathi (12), lost their parents in 1994. Manana did piecework to raise money for her own school fees while her aunt paid for her younger brothers to go to school. “By the end of 2000 I had no more money for school fees and my principal told me not to come back,” Manana said.
Thembalethu heard about the family in June last year and care worker Oliphant Zitha held discussions with the principal to get the teenager reinstated at Mahlatsi Secondary School.
Manana shares a dilapidated mud house with her siblings. The two girls share a bed, while their brothers sleep on the floor in the same room that is used as a kitchen and washing space.
Their circumstances are dire, but thanks to Thembalethu they at least have food and the strength of heart to face another day.
The Thembalethu centre is sponsored by the Nelson Mandela Children?s Fund, the Department of Social Development and the Project Support Association in Zimbabwe. — African Eye News Service