Africa and its children

SIBOVU, Swaziland -- The two old women were debating her future, but 13-year-old Thandeka Motsa could hardly bear to listen.

"Thandeka needs to grow up in a different place," said her great-aunt, Lephinah Vilakati, seated on a woven mat outside a thatched hut with chickens milling about.

The other woman, Thandeka's great-grandmother Sellinah Sibandze, scowled -- and nodded.

Thandeka had lost both parents the previous year -- her mother to AIDS, her father to an accident.

Since then, she and her younger brother and sister had lived with 94-year-old Sibandze on this hilltop farm.

All the duties of the household, and of mothering the children, had fallen to Thandeka. Still, Sibandze had treated the children as a burden, taunting them relentlessly. Thandeka wept each day as she prepared the food or swept the kitchen.

And so this day, as the women sat talking, the question was whether the burden should be shared -- whether Thandeka should move away to live with another family.

"But," Vilakati went on, balancing her argument, "she has a younger sister and brother, and she's a mother to them. And she needs to take care of you, great-grandmother."

Sibandze, lying on the mat in the sun, didn't respond directly. Instead, she berated Thandeka's late father.

"It would have been better if Thandeka's father didn't die," the old woman said.

"But then, he didn't provide much help when he was alive. He didn't even give them a box of matches to light the fires."

Thandeka's eyes narrowed.

"She's lying," she said, under her breath. She slipped away behind a small brick house, curled her long legs under her body, and put her hands over her face.

Tears soon stained the front of her thin blue coat.

The matriarchs talked on for a while before turning the conversation back to her. "What does Thandeka think?" asked the great-aunt.

What could the girl say?

"It's no use," Thandeka said as she wiped her eyes and nose. "If I say something, my great-grandmother will shout at me. It will get worse. I want to go. But if I go, what will happen to my brother and sister?" Thandeka's dilemma is also Africa's dilemma.

The United Nations estimates there are now 11 million children living south of the Sahara Desert who have lost one or both parents to AIDS, and that the number will almost double within six years.

The tiny kingdom of Swaziland, surrounded almost entirely by South Africa, is just one of the African nations overwhelmed by this flood of family tragedy.

Extended families, here and across the continent, have been taking in these children for years. But whether because of poverty or emotional exhaustion, many will no longer bear the burden. More and more children are facing neglect or abuse, or are left to make their own way. Volunteers at some feeding centers report seeing clutches of children walk in from the bush, vagabonds. They arrive unwashed, uncommunicative, and starving.

Swaziland, a proudly traditional nation of one million, has developed a creative national plan for AIDS, including programs to help orphans. Some tribal chiefs plant fields of corn and other vegetables solely for these children.

These efforts, however, are in their infancy, and they are no match for the crisis.

In Sibovu, Thandeka's village of 3,000 in the far southwest of the country, nearly half of the 430 students attending the local primary school this year are orphans, or categorized as vulnerable, meaning that they lack parental supervision and may be going unfed, said Ethwel Matsebula, the school's principal.

The numbers have jumped dramatically in the last year, and the villagers are trying hard to cope.

An informal network of about 40 residents walks the hillsides to check on the sick in homes with no electricity, running water, or adequate sanitation.

The volunteers, all women, are almost all HIV positive themselves. They also oversee three feeding centers for orphans, where volunteers stir pots of corn porridge over wood fires.

But the centers often have no food, the women carry no medicines or food for the sick, and their own ranks are thinning. In two years, 10 of the group's members have died of AIDS-related illnesses.

Four children on their own

One of them was Thembi Elizah Mathola, Thandeka's mother.

She died on Aug. 25, 2003, in the queen-sized bed that she shared with Thandeka (pronounced tan-DECK-a), her two younger children, Khetha, then 8, and Thabo, then 7, and her grandmother, Sibandze. Her fourth child, Lucky Malinga, then 16, slept in another room.

Mathola's worn green Swaziland passport identified her as a "housewife," though she never married and had a job at a sewing factory for several years before becoming too ill to work in 1999. The father of her eldest son lived a five-minute walk from her family's homestead but would have nothing to do with Lucky. The father of her three younger children was Daniel Motsa, a plumber. He lived with another woman near Manzini, a two-hour bus ride north.

Thandeka used to spend many weekends with her father. From time to time, he gave her and her younger siblings money for school fees and books, she said.

Thandeka loved her time with him, but she always went home on Sunday afternoon, knowing her mother needed her.

Mathola relied on her extended family to help feed and clothe her children, and, as she grew sicker, she depended upon Thandeka to care for her and for Khetha and Thabo.

When Thandeka was 8, her mother took her on a two-hour bus ride to a home hospice center, which distributed free medicine. She asked her daughter to memorize the route, and soon Thandeka understood why. A few weeks later, Mathola, too ill to travel, sent the girl by herself.

"I was afraid," Thandeka recalled, speaking in siSwati, the most common language in Swaziland. "But then I started going a lot, and I learned the way. I didn't have a choice."

Over the next four years, she returned to the clinic two or three times a month to fetch medicines. On several occasions, Mathola became so sick the family brought her to a nearby hospital. In the adult ward, the job of caretaker was left to Thandeka, who cooked her meals and tended to her needs. During these years, the girl missed many weeks of school.

Mathola tried to prepare Thandeka and her other children for life without her.

"She told Thandeka and me and our brother and sister that we should stay here on the homestead when she died," said Lucky, her eldest son. "She told us we must abstain from sex because of the dangers of AIDS. And she told us we should be kind to others."

Their mother also tried to lighten the mood as much as possible, delighting her children with renditions of Swazi folk tales. Thandeka's favorite was about a vulture who sweet-talked a mother into letting him watch over her baby, and then flew away with the infant in his clutches.

The mother wandered about the village, singing of her miserable fate, and eventually found her baby.

One of Mathola's friends, Siphiwe Hlophe, director of Swaziland Positive Living for Life, an organization of HIVpositive people with local chapters around the country, said Mathola had one wish for her eldest daughter: "To take over as mother of the younger children."

As Mathola neared death, no one in the extended family wanted to assume responsibility for the children, Hlophe said. No one knew how they would survive.

Some 18 members of the extended Vilakati family, including Thandeka and her siblings, lived on adjacent plots on a rocky hill just north of Sibovu. Lephinah Vilakati, Thandeka's great-aunt, was in charge of the farm. She barked orders for the daily chores and presided over the important moments of life here, from births to funerals.

The farm consisted of three small brick buildings, one tractor, 22 cows, 10 pigs, eight goats, 30 chickens, 20 chicks, seven geese, and seven whippet-thin dogs.

Thandeka, her siblings, and their greatgrandmother lived in a three-room house about 100 feet away; they had no livestock of their own.

After Mathola died, it fell to Thandeka to cook, clean, plant vegetables, and harvest wild edible roots and wild berries for the household. Thandeka's great-aunt, Vilakati, kept an eye on them, but Vilakati barely grew enough vegetables on the farm to feed her own family.

For the children, a second blow came three days after their mother's death.

Thandeka's father, Motsa, died of natural gas poisoning. He had not switched off a burner on his kitchen stove during the night. Police ruled the death accidental, but Hlophe wonders if Thandeka's father may have killed himself. Many people in Swaziland have committed suicide, she said, upon hearing that their partner had AIDS, and that they, too, were therefore likely infected.

Motsa's death left Thandeka and her brother and sister utterly reliant on what they could glean and what their relatives could spare.

One day Hlophe, making her rounds for the Positive Living for Life group, visited the family homestead. As she greeted members of the clan she saw Thandeka, in the distance, running toward her, grinning. The two embraced.

Thandeka's great-aunt, Vilakati, relayed family news. One irritation, she said, was that the primary school principal had sent home Thandeka's younger brother, Thabo, because he wasn't wearing a school uniform.

"I don't know who is the principal sending the boy to," Vilakati said. "There is nobody."

Thandeka looked down, covering her face. It felt like a judgment on her efforts.

And it was another reminder that her mother and father were gone.

Hlophe wrapped her big arms around her. "It's OK," she said, over and over.

An unwelcoming home

In Thandeka's presence, it is not hard to see why her mother put her faith in her.

She is a sturdy girl, tall for her age, about five-foot-six, weighing nearly 100 pounds. Her forehead is broad and smooth, except when she smiles and it crinkles. And when she laughs and lets forth bursts of words in her high-pitched voice, others laugh with her.

Her joy is contagious, especially to her girlfriends, who often dissolve into giggling fits and then climb all over one another in playful embraces. They are the passion in her life, although boys are beginning to creep into her thoughts.

But in the year after her parents' deaths, she didn't have much occasion to smile. She and her brothers and sister did have one big break -- Hlophe's group paid school fees for all four of Mathola's children.

Otherwise, for Thandeka, the burden of being head of a household at her age was simply too much. Her face often darkened. She snapped at her younger brother and sister often, something she had never done before. She found herself sobbing at the slightest provocation.

And there were many provocations.

One night the great-grandmother, upset that the children had eaten most of the dinner and left her little, told Thandeka she must leave and never come back.

Thandeka rushed to the village and found an adult who knew her. Together, they approached the community police. The police visited the homestead and asked the great-grandmother to treat Thandeka more kindly, but the verbal lashings didn't stop.

"She is always saying things like, 'Your mother and father were no good.' Or 'You don't belong here. It's not your house,' "

Thandeka said. Lucky, her brother, said Thandeka bore the brunt of the old woman's ire.

In her misery, Thandeka could think of just one way out -- resurrecting an offer from her best friend's family to take her in. That offer had been rejected by the family matriarchs soon after Thandeka's mother died.

Recently, Thandeka's best friend, Bonsile Tsabedze, 12, had renewed the offer and urged her to take it up with the family elders again. But when she did, Sibandze launched into a tirade, and Thandeka backed off.

The following day she resolved to try again.

After school was let out, Thandeka walked under a blue sky with her two younger siblings toward an orphan feeding center. The narrow path took them through golden grass that towered over their heads. Thandeka was clutching her report card. On tests for eight subjects she scored a combined total of 428 points of a maximum of 800 -- barely passing.

"I didn't do very well," she said glumly.

"I need to study more, but I don't have much time."

The feeding center had been closed the last two days, and the three Motsa children were late for that day's meal. Because the supervisor had left, Thandeka entered the house and found a cold pot of mealymeal, the staple corn porridge. She discovered two spoonfuls of cooked cabbage and mixed it with the mealy-meal for Khetha, now 9, and Thabo, 8. The two gulped it down. Thandeka ate nothing. She hadn't eaten for almost a day.

"I'll wait," she said simply, leaving for her home.

Her mind wasn't on food. She was thinking through what she would say to the family matriarchs.

When she arrived at the farm, the great-aunt called her over. She was sitting on the mat in the sun with Sibandze, who lay on her side. Thandeka sat close to them.

"Thandeka, if you want to go, you must say it, and tell us why," Vilakati said, immediately picking up the conversation from the day before.

Thandeka whispered, "Great-grandmother is harassing us. When we're eating, she says we're taking her food. When we're sleeping, she says we're taking her blankets."

"I didn't know this was happening," Vilakati said. "Why didn't you say something?" Thandeka replied, "You always say I must be patient with great-grandmother, that she is old and her heart is not good."

The great-grandmother interrupted, "Your parents and you, too, Thandeka -- all of you have given me problems."

"This is the very thing that makes me want to leave," Thandeka said.

Vilakati looked to the sky. "We can't force you to stay if you feel harassed," she said finally.

"Her reason for leaving doesn't carry much weight with me," the great-grandmother said. "I don't think they are starving.

They do eat. I don't see what more they want. If we are to be poor, we are to be poor together."

"You are too attached to them," Vilakati said. "Otherwise, you would see they are better off in a different place. If she leaves, fine, I can take care of you, great-grandmother.

My worry is who will take care of the two little kids."

"I think the other family needs to come here and talk," the great-aunt said.

Thandeka stood and started for her friend's homestead, a 40-minute walk past the tiny classrooms at the primary school, past the village's three general stores and one butcher shop, past fields of wilted stalks of corn and dozens of small homes in the hills.

By the time Thandeka arrived, she could barely contain her emotions. She ran up to Jabu Tsabedze, her best friend's mother, who was outside talking with a friend.

"I spoke to my great-grandmother and my great aunt about wanting to stay here," she said breathlessly, and then gulped, suddenly worried that she was assuming too much, that the family would want her now. "If it was still OK with you."

"Oh," Tsabedze said, startled. She looked at the girl closely. Thandeka was staring at her feet.

"OK," Tsabedze said. "I have no problem.

But what about your brother and sister?" "I don't know," Thandeka said.

Tsabedze left to call her husband, Alfred. He was a shop manager at a homebuilding store in Mbabane, the capital.

On the phone, he listened to his wife, and then told her, "We cannot leave Thandeka to suffer. But you should make sure it is OK with her family, that there would be no hard feelings between us."

She agreed. She hung up and told Thandeka she would visit her family in the morning.

Thandeka ran to her friend, Bonsile, and another classmate, Ngabisa Magagula, to tell them the news. The old Thandeka had emerged again, the happy girl who loved to cartwheel, the 13-year-old who just wanted a measure of fun in her life. The wind carried the girls' voices over the hills.

A young girl's choice

The next morning, Jabu Tsabedze felt anxious as she girded herself to talk with the two old women. Still, there was an air of serenity about her. She and her husband had two children, but in recent years had taken in four others who had lost one or both parents. They paid for the children's food, clothing, and school supplies.

If Thandeka and her siblings came, their only worry would be finding money to pay for school fees.

Jabu Tsabedze believed in helping the less fortunate; she also wanted to give girls opportunities that had been denied to her. She said her father believed an education was wasted on a girl, so she completed only fourth grade. Her brother went to universities in the United States and Canada.

Roosters greeted her as she climbed the hill to Thandeka's homestead. She wore a buttoned-up coat to keep out the winter's chill, a skirt, and a wide-brimmed straw hat. The great-aunt, Vilakati, saw her, and the two found a quiet spot. Tsabedze made her offer to take in the three children. The great-aunt answered that Thandeka left, she could never come back.

She didn't explain why, but Jabu Tsabedze believed the older woman resented that Thandeka had gone outside her family for help.

Tsabedze rose wearily. She walked alone across the farm to see the greatgrandmother, and sat down next to her the mat. She told the old woman she was willing to take Thandeka and the younger children. "I am old," the great-grandmother said. "I cannot care for children.

Thandeka wants to go, she can go."

Tsabedze shouted, "Thandeka!" The girl ran to her. Tsabedze spoke firmly, "Thandeka, your great-grandmother has released you to me. You will stay with me. I want you to know that I do discipline children. If you have a plan to misbehave, I will discipline you. Do you understand?" Thandeka nodded.

The great-aunt, Vilakati, arrived and sat with her back to Tsabedze.

"What about the two younger children?" Tsabedze asked.

"They are too young to go," the greatgrandmother replied.

Tsabedze, looking discouraged, asked Thandeka to get her things.

In the house, Thandeka took just a minute to stuff all her possessions into a large white plastic shopping bag.

Outside, Tsabedze told the matriarchs they should talk with Khetha and Thabo.

"I think they will cry," Tsabedze said.

Vilakati yelled for them, and the two suddenly appeared.

"Thandeka is going to be staying with this woman here," she told them. "You will stay with your great-grandmother. You mustn't run away. Tell us if you want to see Thandeka, OK?" Thabo looked dazed. Khetha bowed her head and closed her eyes tightly. Her lower lip trembled, and she nodded yes.

Then she ran to the outhouse and closed the door.

Thandeka watched from the house. "Salani kahle" -- stay well -- she shouted after her sister. And then she was gone.

New home, new crisis

The Tsabedze homestead was a collection of three small homes, a raised chicken pen, and a covered shelter for the family's fat white pig, named Sister.

Jabu Tsabedze showed Thandeka her new bedroom. It consisted of a tall wardrobe stuffed with clothes and three beds pushed against the walls. Three girls shared the room -- her daughter, Bonsile, and two orphans, one of them Thandeka's friend, Ngabisa. Thandeka would share a bed with Bonsile, she said.

Bonsile and Ngabisa rushed into the room and sat next to Thandeka. The three giggled, hugged, and fell on top of each other on the mattress, their hands caressing each's others faces with joy. Soon, they were running in the family's fields, knocking over the tall grass and practicing handstands.

"All I feel right now is happiness," Thandeka said to her friends.

But the feeling wouldn't last.

Three days later, Thandeka received shocking news. There had been an accident.

The tractor had overturned, killing two people. One of them was her greataunt, Lephinah Vilakati.

At week's end, Vilakati was buried on the family homestead. More than 200 people gathered on the hill, including Thandeka and Siphiwe Hlophe, the director of Swaziland's organization for people living with HIV.

Hlophe hugged Thandeka and suggested the girl should move back. "Since your great-aunt has passed, there is no one to cook for your younger brother and sister," she said. Thandeka said nothing.

Hlophe left worried. She said she planned to return to Sibovu at the end of the week. She needed to talk again with Jabu Tsabedze, the great-grandmother, and with Thandeka.

In this new crisis, she knew, no one was thinking about Khetha and Thabo, the children who were now on their own.

End of series

John Donnelly can be reached at donnelly@globe.com