Life, death, hunger and hope in Soweto
by Ana Watts
When Marian Lucas Jeffries returned to South Africa in February, she found the Soweto Home Based Care Givers Co-op and its members changed since her last visit three years ago. There were more of them –– 20 instead of 11 –– and the number of patients and orphans for whom they cared had not increased significantly, so they are able to spend more time with each one. An average of 20 of their 
patients die each day of AIDS, so the numbers may not have increased a lot, but the faces of their patients have changed.
“That many deaths means they work under tremendous stress,” says Marian. “Despite the awful death rate and horrible conditions, the workers have gained literacy, management and health-care skills and many of the them now aspire to careers as auxiliary nurses, similar to our licenses practical nurses.”
Sadly, she found many things related to the co-op had stayed the same or even worsened. They and their patients continued to live in abject poverty with no clean (let alone running) water, no toilets or sanitation systems, and not enough food. Yet they remain committed to their mission –– to restore dignity, ease suffering and provide quality health care to those who are living with and dying of HIV/AIDS.
“Because of these dedicated home-care workers and the availability of more anti-retroviral drugs, there is hope in a hopeless situation. Some patients return to a degree of health that even allows them to return to work,” she says.
At the time of her first visit in 2004, Marian was a student at the Atlantic School of Theology, a former member of the Co-Op Atlantic board and a nurse with extensive experience with recovering addicts and AIDS New Brunswick. The Canadian Co-operative Association (CCA), sent her with funding from the Canadian International Development Association (CIDA), to evaluate the program and offer training. She returned with a care-giver cooperative model that could be adapted for just about any culture, and would certainly be appropriate for care of the elderly in North America and a burning desire help the suffering people in Africa in general, Soweto in particular.
She started with the Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund (PWRDF). She had recently been elected to the board.
The Primate’s Fund rose to the challenge. The publicity inspired others to help as well. The people of Christ Church Cathedral in Vancouver raised enough money to build the co-op a new health center. Eventually it will allow them to move out of the two shipping containers outgrew long ago. The Credit Union Central of British Columbia raised enough funds to supply the co-op patients with food parcels for six months.
Marian’s trip in February began two days after her ordination to the priesthood and was again funded by CCA and CIDA. She was sent as a technical co-operant to lead workshops on communication, deal with organizational issues, teach Co-op Basics and facilitate visioning to the workers.
Once again she encountered profound poverty.
“One of the houses we visited sits in an area fenced off with strands of left over wire. An old set of bedsprings acts as a gate to a property that is shared by four or five shacks in the middle of one of the shantytowns found throughout Soweto. We visited there on our last day.
“All during the week I traveled with Middah, president of the co-op, she talked about the patient we would meet in that house. ‘My patient, she is not doing well,’ she said over and over. It was an understatement. I knelt by the dying woman’s bed and promised I would tell her story when I got back to Canada. She was a tall woman, five foot eight or nine, but I would be surprised if she weighed 60 pounds. In barely a whisper, she told me she had been diagnosed with AIDS eight months before.
“She lived in a tiny, two-room house, (living room/kitchen and one small bedroom) she shared with her mother, her two children, and her brother’s two children. He died of AIDS. Her mother looked tired, sad and defeated as she watched her last child die. “
The experience reminded Marian once again of the value of every penny donated to PWRDF.
“This is a program worth supporting. The home-care workers in Soweto are the strongest people I have ever encountered and they humble me. They will need help, though, to operate their sophisticated new health facility. Right now they are having trouble getting title to the land to build it on. And they continue to need help to find ways to deal with their hunger. Soweto, a shantytown of two million outside Johannesburg, one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world, is not ideal for agriculture. But in spite of everything, these people carry on. They live out God’s call to love our neighbours as ourselves.”
