Sobering South Africa

So here I am. I made it to Johannesburg. I was in South Africa three whole hours before I bought something. Yesterday, soon after I arrived, my friend Mia took me to a market that had lots of African "curios" from all over Africa. I bought a few of them.

Today though, Mia took me to a place called Boikarabelo (pronounced boy-kara-bello, which means something like "a community working together"; Boikarabelo was formerly called the Botshabelo Community Development Trust, Magaliesburg). It was a sobering experience to say the least.

Boikarabelo is a charity organization that helps orphans, many of which are orphans due to AIDS and are also HIV positive. Marion and Con Cloete began it in 1991.

Con explained the place to me this way: They basically do everything that would normally be done to raise a child, except they are raising anywhere from 130 to 200 children.

Boikarabelo provides them food and shelter in the form of dormitories. Con and Marion also live in the dorms, along with their twin daughters and a few other volunteer workers spread out in different dorms. There is very little room and virtually no privacy for them as they have babies and very young children sleeping there too (many of the older children there are responsible for looking after the younger ones).

The school-age children are given an education to the ninth-grade level (the mandatory school-leaving age in South Africa), and they have extracurricular activities such as soccer and karate (with a few black belts).

The children are also learning skills that will help them to get work. Everything that goes on in that place, the children are a part of so they can learn. They call it skills-transference.

For example, Con and Marion want to start an official website (there are many places around the world that use their name, but they have no control over the contents of those sites. They also have no idea if they're even receiving their fare share of donations that come through those sites). So Mia's cousin Alister is going to make one for them (I'm writing the copy for it and will post a link to it once it's finished). Alister will then teach Marion some code so she knows how to maintain the site and she will in turn try to teach the children. The site may also contain a blog, with the idea that one child will write in the blog what they've done each day for a week. That way, they will learn writing skills.

That sounds pretty high tech, but they are also teaching the children extremely basic things. Some didn't know how to use a toilet, for example. Con told a story where three children came in and had never seen one before. When they saw it flush, they ran out for fear of their lives.

They are also learning things like farming, since they have to grow their own food. They're also starting a fishing hole.

They do everything they can for themselves and their resourcefulness is amazing. The merry-go-round in the small playground also pumps water into the nearby village.

It's a wonderful organization, but it's clear that it is a real struggle. It's not hard to see they need help. The entire thing is run on donations of money, clothes and goods, and it's never enough. The dormitories are stuffed to capacity, their blankets are worn and it looked like some of the bunk beds had garbage bags for sheets. The buildings are sturdy, but glass panes are broken ("glass and children with soccer balls don't mix," Con said) and they're just generally run down. Con says they're so busy with the day-to-day, that maintaining the place is almost impossible. Some days, there is absolutely no food.

Many of the children have AIDS, which is rampant here. Some, both boys and girls, have been raped at a very young age and so are dealing with horrible traumas (there's a myth in South Africa that sex with a virgin will cure HIV. As a result, children as young as 3 months old have been raped). Marion counsels them and does her best to bring them back.

It's horrible what some of these children have lived through. Con said that every child, every building, every animal that's there, has a story.

They're doing what they can to give the story a happy ending.