Ascent of Women (22 page)

Bringing the African and Canadian grandmothers together was the brainchild of Ilana Landsberg-Lewis, the director of the Stephen Lewis Foundation. “We were funding hundreds of projects in Africa that provide food, school fees, medicines and microcredit earning initiatives, and it occurred to me that most of the people receiving the funds were grandmothers.” For Landsberg-Lewis, the penny dropped. She held a press conference in Canada with a trio of famous grannies—the country’s former governor general, Adrienne Clarkson; Shirley Douglas, the actress and activist daughter of the Canadian political icon Tommy Douglas and the mother of Keifer Sutherland; and Landsberg-Lewis’s own mom, the journalist Michele Landsberg.

The launch of the program was in August 2006 when the Stephen Lewis Foundation brought one hundred grannies from Africa and two hundred from Canada together in Toronto to address the life-and-death problems the African grandmothers were facing. Many were themselves HIV-positive. All of them were financially stretched and physically exhausted. Grief suffused the heartbreaking stories they shared. The promise that their sons and daughters would take care of them in their old age had disintegrated with the ashes of their dead children.

At the close of that first meeting, the Canadian grandmothers made a pledge: “We are acutely conscious of the enormous debt owed to a generation of women who spent their youth freeing
Africa, their middle age reviving it and their older lives sustaining it. We will not rest until they can rest.”

Then the African grannies serenaded their Canadian sisters with “We Shall Overcome.” The Canadian grannies sang right back to them, with “Amazing Grace.” Laughter and tears bonded the women into a powerful international network of activists. About twelve thousand Canadian grandmothers have since raised more than $10 million for the cause.

Some of the African grannies came from the township of Khayelitsha, about forty minutes south of Cape Town, South Africa. I visited them before the event in Swaziland and found a tiny room full of committed if slightly overwhelmed grandmothers.

A single note in a clear contralto resonated through the room as I walked into the little building that houses Grandmothers against Aids and Poverty (GAPA), where a dozen women bent over beadwork, sewing machines and knitting needles. Like a choir director’s baton, the note raised the other women’s voices in powerful, soulful harmony—the kind that vibrates against the ribs, swells the chest, seeps into the soul and makes the hips sway. The music, like the rhythm of life, was the sound of solidarity in this place, which when the grannies first began to gather was the centre of unspeakable sadness and despair.

One of the women, Constance Sohena, sixty-three, told me that after her daughter died of AIDS, she locked herself in the house and wouldn’t come out for six months. But once she met the other grannies, she began to recover, could devote herself to raising her grandson and leading a granny support group, in the process turning into a formidable human rights activist—a transformation that made Sohena laugh when she thought about the despair she started with.

Alicia Mdaka, sixty-nine, lost two daughters and a granddaughter to AIDS. She was raising four orphaned grandchildren and said, “I wished at first that I would die too. When I heard about the GAPA grannies, I realized I’m not alone.” In fact, the strength she gained from the group propelled her to accept an invitation to fly to Malta in 2005 to address the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting, in order to tell the world of the plight of the GAPA grannies.

While her great-granddaughter, thirteen-month-old Salome, played happily under the sewing table where Mdaka was working, she recounted how she felt at the start of that journey. “I’d never been on a plane, never left South Africa. But I’m not scared of anything now.” She credited GAPA for pulling her back from the brink of suicide. She scooped up Salome, who snuggled into her arms for her morning bottle, and said, “A granny can never be useless. You get thread, you sew, you sell what you make, buy bread for the children and electricity so your house will be light.”

Her daughter Olive died in 1999 and left her with three children to raise, and then three-month-old Zizipho, her eldest daughter’s child, was born HIV-positive and died in 2000. A year later, two of her sons were murdered in the violence-racked township. Then Zizipho’s mother succumbed to AIDS and left her son in Mdaka’s care. “My shack burned down that year. So I had no house, no place to have a funeral for my daughter, no money to bury her.” Today, she looks after two more sons who are mentally ill and cannot work. A third daughter is living with full-blown AIDS because the antiretroviral drug that can control the illness arrived in time to save her.

Mdaka seemed like a miracle of survival in the mean lottery of HIV/AIDS. She was determined that her troubles were behind
her. “I live in a block-brick house now—no more shack. There’s no water inside yet, but next year I’ll put my sinks and bath inside. I sew pinafores, drape covers, dresses and pillowcases. I sell them at the pay points [where pensions are handed out] and at the train station and taxi ranks—wherever there are plenty of people.”

Inside the little grey brick house, surrounded by a patchy lawn and a six-foot wall topped with barbed wire—the headquarters of the project for 410 grandmothers in Khayelitsha since 2004—newspaper accounts of the first grannies’ gathering in Canada covered the bulletin board. One of them described the visit: “It was marvellous in Canada. It’s quiet, clean, no shacks, big buildings. The people in Toronto are helpful. They don’t have racism. Whites are with blacks—even married to blacks.”

Of that event, Mdaka told me, “We met other African grannies who are in chaos and could tell them how to start a group, find others, unite, get some beads, make some dresses. Then you have money for bread.” They also received newfound support from Canadian grandmothers who vowed to be there with dollars and deeds until the wretched pandemic is tamed.

The statistics are mind-boggling. Of the 40 million people with HIV/AIDS worldwide, 25 million live in sub-Saharan Africa and 57 percent of them are women. Thirteen million children are orphans, a number that’s expected to rise to 18 million by 2013. There are seven thousand new cases of HIV/AIDS a day, nine hundred of them in South Africa. In 2008, only 20 percent were getting the antiretroviral drugs they needed to survive. The rollout is better now but still not enough.

Statistics on grandmothers are scant because they haven’t been included in the studies done on HIV/AIDS. The tragic myth in these afflicted countries is that the grannies are HIV-negative
and therefore AIDS-free, which means rape is rising among this already vulnerable group.

The first study on grandmother-led households and HIV/AIDS was done in 1999 by the Institute of Aging at the University of Cape Town. At the time, the researchers established that grandmothers were the sole supporters of hundreds of thousands of newly orphaned children and that they didn’t have the financial means to cope. The stigma surrounding HIV/AIDS meant that their houses were being attacked and burned. They were ostracized. They had no one to talk to. Those who had jobs had to give them up to care for their dying children at home. Traditional funerals—a week-long mourning period during which visitors have to be fed, and a marquee raised in front of the house, a bus hired to get everyone to the burial, a cow or several sheep slaughtered for the reception—cost a fortune, and many of the grandmothers couldn’t afford them.

The findings of the report were made public at an international conference on aging in Madrid in 2002, and the plight of the grannies was on the map. Kathleen Brodrick, an occupational therapist from Cape Town who was already familiar with the developing catastrophe in Khayelitsha, had been hired by the researchers to interpret the data. “We needed to start support groups, which meant finding people who would discuss a topic that was taboo,” she said. At first seventeen grandmothers turned up to meetings she arranged, then thirty, then huge numbers of desperate women in crisis joined. They started with patchwork—sewing together bits of donated cloth to make pinafores, blankets, anything they could stitch and sell to bring in money. While they sewed, they talked. “They were sickly-looking, with a grey pallor, miserable and quiet when we started,” says Brodrick. “By the time
the four-week trial period was over, their self-confidence was growing, they looked better and they said, ‘What now?—we can’t stop this meeting.’ ”

That was the beginning of GAPA. Brodrick stayed on as a volunteer, and today she does the fundraising and planning, and the group has a full-time manager and their own meeting house—the one I visited. “It is not a handout organization,” says Brodrick firmly. “It’s a hand up. If people need money or food, we send them to the agencies that can help. GAPA is about figuring out how to help yourself.” At the workshops, every one of them run by a grandmother, the grannies learn about human rights, parenting skills, how to access government grants and draw up a will. There is counselling for grief, coping with child raising and finding health care. And in Canada and elsewhere, the groups funding the initiatives are also run by grannies.

It would be easy to dismiss the well-heeled southwestern Ontario grandmothers’ group called Oomama (which means “our mother”) as guilt-ridden do-gooders, but that would underestimate a powerful force of women whose aim is nothing short of international solidarity. Carol Holmes, for example, was running a bed and breakfast in upscale Niagara-on-the-Lake when I met her. Ask her about her own granddaughter, Calliope, and she chokes up, describing the relationship she has with the thirteen-month- old child who calls her Mamm (she hasn’t quite mastered the
gr
in Gram). Her hopes for this child are palpable. “The thought of other grandmothers wanting to feed their grandchildren, get them educated with no support, no means, is heartbreaking to me. This is not about knitting booties and making quilts, it’s about making change.” Holmes and her extended family kicked in $6000 for the Stephen Lewis Foundation
one Christmas, donating the money they would have spent on Christmas gifts.

Or listen to Sherry Ardell, who recalls reading a story about Stephen Lewis’s work in
The Globe and Mail
on January 4, 2003. “I didn’t know what I could do. I only knew I had to do something. I was born at the end of the Second World War. When I asked my parents, they didn’t seem to know what was going on in the camps [in Germany] but now we know [what’s going on in Africa].” She raised $22,000 at a garage sale that summer and put on a speaking event featuring Stephen Lewis in her hometown of Oakville, at which she tripled the garage sale total.

Then there’s Bev LeFrancois, a woman who’s been in the trenches for change for thirty years and counts the struggle to include women’s rights in the Canadian Constitution as one of the battles she helped fight and win. “This grandmothers’ issue in Africa is just one more terrible example of the way women are treated. How is it we can afford to make war but can’t help these women to care for the orphaned children? I hope we can get resources to do for those grandchildren the way we are privileged to do for ours.”

~

Back in Khayelitsha, the cemetery was full. Some families had had to bury one member on top of another. Hand-painted signs reading “Coffins for Sale” dotted the street corners. When I asked the grannies where all the men were, they said, “They’re either dead or have gone off with a younger woman.”

“It’s difficult to raise up a grandchild,” said Constance Sohena, who suffers from elephantiasis and lives in a two-bedroom house
with five of her grandchildren, her surviving daughter, two sons and her husband. “They are demanding and not satisfied whatever you are doing. You never know if teenagers are angry with you or with something else.” She was referring to an incident that happened when she came home with new shoes for thirteen-year-old Sonwabo. He threw them to the floor in disgust saying, “I won’t wear them,” and stomped out of the house. The running shoes were not “Toughies,” the black oxford-style shoes that the other boys were wearing. Like most style-conscious teenagers, Sonwabo didn’t want to be uncool.

Sohena’s daughter Amanda died in her arms in 1999. She was devastated. “I lost my passion, was angry all the time. One day a woman came and told me about the workshop. She talked me into going with her. I wanted to know more about this disease that took my child away. I began to accept that I’m not alone. I came to terms with HIV. I talked about it for the first time. We learned from each other.”

She learned plenty, discovering she had rights, such as a pension, that were being denied by the government. “I know about my rights now. No one can come and tell me what to think. I think for myself.” Five years after her daughter died, one of her sons was stabbed to death. No one was charged with the killing. Sohena went to the police and demanded an investigation, but they said the docket with the information about the incident had been lost. She said they’d better find it. They did. Her son’s murderer was arrested and is now in jail. Everyone in the area knew not to mess with Sohena when it comes to women’s rights, violence and abuse or the treatment of HIV/AIDS patients.

The task these women have inherited is immense. They worry about living long enough to raise the children to adulthood
and wonder who will be left to bury them and whether the old traditions will be lost because no one can afford to keep them.

Thenjiwe Madzinga, sixty-nine, has been raising four grandchildren since her daughter Christina died in 2003. “I had another daughter, Nyameka, and a son, Jorda—they were both working, bringing me money to take care of the children. But both died last year—they followed each other within one month. All I can think about is if God will keep me here until these children are grown and can do things for themselves.”

A dozen blocks away from the GAPA house, in the two-room, four-by-four-metre shack she’s painted bright blue, Madzinga had greeted me with a warm smile, but her equanimity collapsed when she told the story of nursing her daughters and son, how they suffered, that she had nothing for them, no drugs. “I wish I’d had enough food in the house for the children. I wish there was someone to take care of me. I’m not happy,” she admitted.