Dawn seeps through the bleached curtain and Thembeni Ndlovu rouses the five children beside her.
Yawning and stretching they shuffle into the sun while Thembeni fills a plastic bowl for bathing, sweeps the yard and scours bare cupboards for breakfast.
Their clothes ragged, their feet bare, their bellies empty, the Ndlovu children are orphans. Thembeni, the eldest at 11, is the head of the household. She has been forced into adulthood by the death of her parents from Aids and in Kamhlushwa, a dusty village on South Africa’s border with Swaziland, there are dozens like her.
The United Nations estimates that 11-million children in sub-Saharan Africa have lost at least one parent to the disease. By the end of the decade there will be 20-million. Aid agencies say extended family networks of uncles, aunts and grandparents are increasingly overwhelmed, leaving orphans to fend for themselves.
This is the story of just one such family.
The Ndlovu children are still together and attend school but Thembeni’s attempt to raise them is an unequal battle against poverty, neglect and her own youth. Asked what she wants most she replies: ”Food. And toys — a doll.”
A design on her black T-shirt says ”I rule”, and the siblings do follow her orders.
While she collects firewood Sunday (10) sweeps the house, Velaphi, eight, fetches water and Sannie, seven, washes dishes. Only the youngest, Thokoza, five, and Jane, four, are allowed to loaf.
Thembeni boils water for tea over a fire in the yard. Once the tea is drunk she scoops up the household’s one toy, a sock rolled into a ball, and oversees a game of catch. It is a display of resilience and spirit but cracks are visible. Behind his bucktooth smile Sunday, the oldest boy, is moody and combative. Thokoza, the youngest boy, is withdrawn.
In contrast to his brothers, Velaphi, the eight-year-old, heaves a wheelbarrow of water canisters from the pump, usually a job for stout women.
The younger girls, Sannie and Jane, show promise at school but homework is not a priority and the one book in the house, a Roald Dahl paperback, George’s Marvellous Medicine, is missing half its pages. There is no electricity and often no money for candles or paraffin for the lamp.
The children are not entirely alone. A local charity, Thembalethu Home Based Care, pays an adult neighbour, Lerato Ndlovu (no relation), R270 a month to cook and clean and a Catholic nun donates food.
Ndlovu complains that Thembeni allows her siblings to play past midnight and friends to eat their stock of oats and maize: ”She plays too much.”
By Kamhlushwa’s standards the family had been well off: a house made of brick with window panes and electrical goods powered by car batteries. Now the television gathers dust and the fridge contains eight toilet rolls and cough medicine, but no food.
Since they have their birth certificates and their parents’ death certificates each sibling is entitled to a monthly grant of R529 but welfare officials refuse to pay, according to Sally McKibbin, the founder of Thembalethu Home Based Care: ”The bureaucracy is not responding to HIV/Aids. The government has not catered for this disaster.”
The Ndlovu children are learning to ration food and grow vegetables on a plot the size of three beach towels but Thembeni struggles with the responsibility.
”If the food finishes there is no one I can tell,” she says.
As the sun sets the six children strip and again wash from the plastic bowl on the porch. From neighbouring houses parents can be heard summoning their children home for supper.
In their yard in inky blackness they play Tiger, a game involving much shouting and running. Later, huddled around a candle in the house, they start a hymn but do not know all the words so launch into the national anthem, Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika.
Jane, unaware that today is her fourth birthday, rubs her eyes, clearly tired, but her siblings so enjoyed the song that they sing it five more times.
Eventually Thembeni decrees it is time to sleep and the children clamber into the two beds they share. For a few hours the house is silent.
To help Thembalethu Home Based Care, contact Sally McKibbin at [email protected] – Guardian Unlimited Â