I spent last weekend in Chicago and then I flew back to Toronto Sunday night so that I could get up early Monday morning and take the train to Kingston, ON, where I joined up with the AfriGrand Caravan. The AfriGrand Caravan is a cross-country speaking tour that the Stephen Lewis Foundation is organizing. The keynote speakers on the tour are an African grandmother who cares for her orphaned grandchildren (or grandnieces/nephews) and a young woman who has been orphaned by AIDS. Because the tour goes to 40 cities over the course of two months, there are three different pairs of women speaking on the tour.
The first leg of the tour, which we're on now, features two women from Pretoria, South Africa. Regina is a nurse, is a grandmother of four who cares for her HIV-positive niece and her niece's children, and is the executive director of Tateni Home Care Nursing Services in Mamelodi, South Africa. Nkulie is a 17-year-old young woman who lost her mother this year to AIDS and takes part in Tateni's after-school and drop-in programs for teenagers. I got to hear Nkulie and Regina speak at stops in three cities in Ontario. I spent significant time with them outside of the formal tour events, since we were all staying in the same homes, traveling in the van together, etc.
In the formal speeches, I heard their stories about the work that Tateni does in its community to provide home-based care to people living with HIV, TB, and other diseases and the work it does to take a comprehensive approach to health that involves providing adequate nutrition and psychosocial services as well as providing nursing and medication. Tateni, for instance, organizes quarterly birthday parties for the children in the community (both the orphans and other children made vulnerable by life circumstances, parental health) so that all of the children can experience this taken-for-granted part of growing up that, otherwise, they would miss out on. This is just one example of what it means for Tateni to take a comprehensive approach to dealing with AIDS and with the children orphaned by the pandemic. Another is the role that home care workers play in making sure that all of Tateni's clients have their basic needs met in addition to their medications and their sponge baths. Tateni, for instance, will provide food to families in need and then the home care workers will make sure that there is actually the fuel in the home that is needed to prepare the food and that the roofs aren't in too desperate need of repair (thus leaving the clients even more vulnerable to illness). Perhaps these seem like relatively simple things, but they're the types of things that, so often, an organization like Tateni would be unable to fund if it only received funding from more traditional sources and might be interested in funding only food aid or only school uniforms or only TB treatment without providing the funding for the organization to respond to the actual needs of the community. (Also, very few organizations/foundations/etc. will provide funding for salaries because they want to be able to claim that they provided treatment or food for a certain number of people and salaries don't formally help with those numbers, although they're clearly essential to it. The Stephen Lewis Foundation, however, does provide Tateni funding to use to pay its home-based care workers. The stipend they get is barely a salary, but since these workers all have families to support, it is absolutely necessary both to Tateni's effective work in the community and to increasing the overall employment in the community.)
Outside of the formal speeches, I learned that Regina is busily preparing for her organization's Annual General Meeting (and this is no small feat, since Tateni is a pretty large organizations that employs 72 people!). So, when she's not busy speaking at the tour stops or charming the pants off the event organizers and our hosts in each city, she is sending emails and writing reports. Nkulie is missing her uncle's wedding and also having to study for her grade 12 exams while in Canada, but she decided to come on the tour, despite these inconveniences, because of her gratitude for the role Tateni has played in her life and because of her desire to build further solidarity between North Americans and Africans and to see more projects in sub-Saharan Africa receive the funding they need to provide the type of services that Tateni provides .
Nkulie plans to go to law school when she finishes high school and then wants to go into politics; she was reading A Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela's autobiography, on the van rides between cities. Tateni has helped her to stay in school throughout her mother's illness and since her mother's death and has helped her deal with her anger and grief at her mother's passing.
In some of our downtime on Tuesday, Nkulie and I went swimming in the very cold outdoor pool at the house where we were staying. Afterwards, Regina explained to me that kids in her community have no real experiences of swimming since they are hours from the ocean and near no large bodies of water. She told me that one of her goals is to organize a trip for 15-20 of the older children to take an overnight train trip to the sea, spend the day at the sea, and then take an overnight train trip back. These types of excursions, she explained, may seem like a luxury in the face of so many unmet basic needs. But they are exactly the type of things that help the kids keep on in the face of everything. Being able to escape for a day to a completely different environment gives the kids something to hold on to and dream about.
I could go on and on about Regina and Nkulie, but I will end here.
I've always believed in the work that the Stephen Lewis Foundation funds, but getting to meet and hear from Regina and Nkulie has helped me to understand even more clearly just how much this work is needed and just how much is possible when grassroots organizations like Tateni receive the funding that they need to save lives and restore hope in their communities.
Wow Healy! I knew these women would be phenomenal, but this just really drives it all home! I cannot wait to meet the women from Malawi!
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