The
Oprah South African Leadership Project provides cross-cultural
immersion and international exposure through travel
and study in South Africa for Morehouse College students.
In the future, it will involve an exchange of students
between Morehouse and South Africa, and will encompass
ethical leadership training and community service
in both Atlanta and South Africa.
June
1, 2005
When
the Morehouse College and Butler University students
rode through Nyanga, a Cape Town township, the sight
was breathtaking.
The
group had seen townships before: various places in
Soweto; a particularly impoverished part of Alexandra;
a five-minute gasp at the pieced together shacks of
Cape Flats as the bus sped past before entering the
shiny, clean newness of the Waterfront.
“It
felt like there’s no sense of security,”
said Brian Buchanan ’06, a biology and pre-dentistry
major, who hails from Atlanta. “They need help.
The doors are made out of aluminum. Someone could
just kick it down. What if a tornado came or something?
They’re just living behind aluminum walls, a
fence, really. A closet. They’re using everything
they can possibly use to just live -- whether it’s
scraps or garbage. They make everything around them
useful, and I think we’re blinded by the conveniences
we have around us.”
 What
the students see of Nyanga is rows upon rows of aluminum
and wood shacks. They are sobered with the disbelief
that people—human beings—can actually
live here, and that generations of blacks have spent
lifetime after lifetime in the same crumbling space.
“When
you could move to Khayelitsha, anyone in Nyanga who
was able move left,” says Stephanie Kilroe,
director of fundraising for the Etafeni Playgroup
Project. “If you couldn’t get out, you
stayed here.”
“Here”
is Etafeni, a non-profit daycare center where 60 children
infected with HIV/AIDS and non-infected children from
the Nyanga township are cared for while their parents
work. The Morehouse-Butler group tours the Etafeni’s
day care center, garden and office building. The group
learns that the office building will soon house living
quarters for two staff members who provide support
for Etafeni’s various projects.
Etafeni,
a Xhosa word meaning “open space,” began
20 years ago when Rose Mbude began a playgroup on
a plot of vacant land near her house to care for the
children in her neighborhood—many of them from
families too poor to pay for them to attend preschool.
By the time the playgroup had grown to 100 children,
Mbude had trained eight women to assist her. Then,
HIV/AIDS began to ravish the area. Soon, parents began
to die AIDS-related deaths, leaving orphaned children
with a stigma of illness and death that engulfed even
their surviving family members.
Today,
Etafeni extends its outreach beyond caring for children
by empowering Nyanga residents to fight HIV/AIDS,
while also helping community members who have the
virus.
 Trained
HIV/AIDS counselors, paid R2,000 a month—about
$330 in U.S. dollars—and patient advocates provide
support to children, adults and families affected
by HIV/AIDS. A vegetable garden, run by community
members, provides fresh legumes to Etafeni’s
HIV-positive clients. Construction of a bakery is
underway, as well as construction of a site for the
Etafeni Income Generation Project, which is currently
housed in a church that is a 30-minute ride away from
Nyanga.
“The
goal is to empower the community economically,”
said Kilroe.
The
Income Generation Project trains HIV-positive men
and women in making beaded crafts, smocks and patchwork
fabric. The people are paid for each item, which are
then sold internationally.
In
a room that doubles as a Sunday school classroom,
11 women and one man make beaded neck chains for a
convention in Cape Town. One of the women, Nokhwezi
Ngayi, jokes about her husband, who gave her HIV but
does not fully acknowledge that he has the virus.
He was taking some of the prescribed medicine given
to her and she had to lock the medicine cabinet so
he would not take all of her medicine supply.
Ngayi
is upbeat and matter of fact about her HIV-positive
status. She’s been married 14 years to a man
she admits she no longer loves and says she remains
in the marriage only for her 8-year-old daughter.
She discovered her HIV-positive status last spring,
when her sister, who is now dead from an AIDS-related
illness, encouraged her to get tested.
When
Ngayi told her husband about her status, she says
he was not surprised. He just answered her with an
empty stare. She calls her experience an anomaly.
Some of the women known by Ngayi, who told their husbands
about being HIV-positive, have been physically abused,
kicked out of their homes or evicted from their communities.
Ngayi’s daughter and family know about her HIV-positive
status and have accepted her. She calls acceptance
part of the answer to curing South Africa’s
HIV/AIDS challenges.
“Every
time I disclose my HIV/AIDS status, [people] don’t
believe it. They think that [the people at the Income
Generation Project] are paid for saying we are HIV
positive,” she says. “The only thing I
can do is speak out against HIV/AIDS. It takes time
for people to accept.”
|
