THE POOR DIE DIFFERENT FROM US Reflections on South Africa - Part I

In the last weeks of October, parishioners Dr. Gene Ott and Chuck MacDonald traveled back to South Africa, taking with them seven members of the House of Hope Presbyterian Church. This journey had a twofold purpose: we were to continue our work with Guguletu’s doctors and nurses, and introduce our traveling companions to the pandemic of South Africa. Meetings, briefings and travel allowed scant time for little else than some picture and note taking. This is the first of three reflections upon returning to Minnesota.

On a South African Thursday, our traveling team of nine was dispatched in different directions throughout Guguletu, a township of 350,000 southeast of Cape Town. The government calls the township’s citizens temporary residents and has done so since the mid forties. The dentist went to one clinic, the two doctors to another, five were to visit the sick in their homes, and I was asked to go with the two ministers to help bury a two-month-old baby. Directing me to a small car, Reverend Spiwo simply said , “ They want you to take your camera and tell their story. They want some memory of this.”

In life we come to know that joys can be different, as can sorrow, but the death of a child has its own sadness. One mourns the loss of hope for a life unlived. When the car turned into the vast and treeless cemetery, I knew I was back again into the very center of this country‘s sorrow. This day we were alone in a huge sand field and some twenty-five of us stood by one of five, freshly dug small gravesites. The women, just women, surrounded the young mother in her grief. She may only have to do this just once. She too has AIDS and most likely knew nothing of the medicines that might have saved her tiny daughter.

Other thoughts started to emerge as the women began to sing. We were standing in a desert. These people whose country it once was, had been given by an Apartheid government a desert to live and bury their dead in. Three and four feet down into those cemetery plots was still sand, brown-gray sand. The young woman minister told me that the men do not want to come to the burial because some believe that this is a curse brought on by women It occurred to me that in a way a part of the gospel was being repeated. The part about the women standing at Calvary because most of the apostles had fled. Two thousand years of history and some of it repeats itself.

As they placed the small white box into the sand, I started to hear English words being sung. It was a song I was going to hear several times in the days that followed. It is the song the Xhosa people have come to sing in the face of this plague, “Never Give Up, We must Never Give Up.” I turned away and all I could see was more freshly dug graves that would be filled on Saturday.

Economics do not eliminate life rituals, it only changes them. When the mourners finished their prayers, one by one they threw handfuls of sand into the small grave and in a few moments the grave was covered over. I watched as they struggled to secure a small white cross into the sand. It had a little plastic band stapled to it with the little girl’s name. As custom decrees even the poor must host a gathering, so we drove to the house to continue the proper mourning rites. As each one entered the home, they reached down and washed their hands in the large bowls of water placed on the ground. Two and only two trays of very small sandwiches were presented to the guests and one case of colored soda. I tried my darnest to fade into the group since I was the only white and American. Even in the house few men were present, and they were mostly the elders. When the two black ministers had sat with the family in silence for maybe a half-hour, they stood up and we went back to the church.

Arriving at the church offices I found no one there but the secretary and a lone crying woman. I asked the secretary to translate for me what was happening and I was told that the woman had been thrown out of her house because her husband had just discovered he was HIV positive and he blamed her. My pocket found enough money for food for a couple of days and the secretary would call some of the women to help. When Spiwo returned, someone would be sent to talk to the husband. This sounds so one-sided, but one knows from enough time in South Africa that the men too have suffered. They for the last 400 years have been sent off to work in the mines and not allowed to visit their families except once or twice a year. When they do come home from the only job that will support their wife and children, they feel worthless because the women left alone, have assumed all the rest of life’s jobs. Including the blame for everything that goes wrong.

Twenty-four hours earlier, the nine of us had been asked to come to the J. L Zwane Center for a 5:00 p.m. meeting. Life had put all of us in many, many meetings but not one of us had ever sat in a meeting with over one hundred and twenty-five women and men in a very large room where we, the guests, were the minority. We did not have AIDS. For a very long time it seemed, we sat and listened as members, new to the group, stood and said their names and told where they were from and why they had come. Reverend Spiwo translated aloud for us and as person after person stood, some most shyly saying that they were sick and had come to this group for support, I knew that we were witnessing the grimmest model of a support group, one that helps it’s members not to die alone.

Sitting in the group were a few whites, a lone women who had come from her own white church with two teenage girls to volunteer. There were also two white men. I was told this small band of church people came every week bringing food and praying with the group. Zethu, Reverend Spiwo’s wife and the other nurses attend the meetings and sometimes the doctors when they have time. And yes they sing and pray the words of “Never Give Up, We Must Never Give Up”, loudly and strongly.

So where is hope? Two and half years ago there were no support groups. Now one sees the beginnings of some organization. The J. L. Zane Church is recognized in Cape Town and even in Johannesburg for it’s pioneer work in attempting to organize relief efforts for the sick, their families, the orphans. We can’t forget the orphans. Since this support group started, homes have been found for twenty-five little children whose parents or parent

Chuck MacDonald is on the St. Joan of Arc Parish Council. He is the Project Coordinator for the South African Hospice program. He is currently a member of the Shannon Leadership Institute. Chuck can be reached at chuckmacdonald@attbi.com.

have died. In the townships they do not have the sophisticated health care and social systems we have come to expect in our society. These loving and devastated people are working with what they have, with minimal government help, with mostly verbal promises from the UN and other governments. But yet they have hope with the help of some church groups and the few brave South African whites who drive into the township every Tuesday night with food and support and to stand in joined hands to pray and to sing...."Never Give Up, We Must Never Give Up.”

Other Reports from this Trip "Never Give Up, Never Give Up" "Journeying Among A Forgotten People - The Rural Transkei" Reports from other Trips Winter 2002 Trip Year 2001 Trip Year 2000 Trip