This is Angela, Thanda’s founder, again and this is my latest letter home… something that I have been working on for a while. Some of it was written on the beach, some of it written in the car, and I hope you enjoy it…
The town of Hibberdene where we live
“As we drive north, I am struck by the beauty around me. Everything seems to sparkle in the mid-morning heat, illuminated by the sunshine. There are some rolling hills, lush with sugarcane and palm trees, but still the landscape seems flat and wide and stretches infinitely in all directions, dropping off only into the sea, where another natural spectacular carries on in wonder. Seemingly simple, yet too complex for us to comprehend. Plain, yet full of life.
As I look to all sides and see the beauty of this bright land stretching for miles until it meets the clear, clear blue sky, uninterrupted in its full expanse above us, I realize what it is about Africa that touches us — perhaps just one of its secrets. It is the open plains, the open sky, the open valleys which ground us and give us a foundation on which to live. We feel rooted here because we are part of this land. We do not rise above it into sky-high buildings or climb below it into subway tunnels. We have not carved it; we are part of it, the way it is, and the sun beats down on us as we walk with the earth. We are like the acacias that grow from it, the animals that mark territories in it. We are rooted here. Life and death make sense here. Born from the earth, one goes back to the earth.
And it is within this landscape that we see the devastation of AIDS. Already, a fifth of children in the country are orphaned and they say it will soon be one in three. But what I see in the poor rural areas, where children or elderly grandmothers raise children, is a situation that is already drastic. What will become of this generation of children that grow up without accountability, nutrition, guidance, love, or aspirations? There are already 14 million orphans of AIDS across Africa. How can we let so many children grow up with the pain of feeling alone and the uncertainty that tomorrow will be any better, with the sorrow of having seen too much too young?
And that is how I end up on a visit overseas sitting cross-legged on my bed from childhood, typing as fast as I can. Tears stream down my face and I think ‘I’ve finally lost it. I can’t do this anymore.’ It’s just too hard to go from one extreme to the other and I think, ‘Does anybody notice? Does anybody really care?’ They say that 5 people die from AIDS each minute; each minute we think about the fact that we are out of Ziplocks, that we shouldn’t eat too much today, that the driver at that stoplight was such a jerk. The dichotomy is hard. And when Thanda continues to run out of funding every month, I am not sure what we are doing is worth it anymore.
Then I go out to the community where we are working and I watch. I sit back and what I see makes me bite my lip and cry. Twelve Thanda teachers, who just a few years ago were out of work, are now themselves designing programs that will change their students’ lives. Programs that will motivate, educate, and fill in the gaps left by too many missing parents. When I stand inside the library that we are building for the community. When our basketball coach, Melusi, posts on Facebook, ‘My generation will make a change…every time I bounce a ball I realize that basketball is not just a sport it’s a way to heal those lonely hearts without parents, to work as a team/family, to think outside of the box, to bring education closer to their hands and heart, basketball is a way [to] show how to come up with a solution in any life situation. Basketball is a lot more than a sport so let’s spread the love of basketball in rural areas”. Then I know we are making a difference.
I read recently that the UN says a third of the world’s food is wasted, that developed nations throw away as much uneaten food in a year as is produced in the whole of Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet the children of Sub-Saharan Africa bare the physical, permanent scars of malnutrition. As I wrote for a speech I made last year, ‘Yes, this is all foreign and very far away, but these are people. Yes, it’s all part of bigger past systems that created inequality, but we are all a part of these bigger systems that continue to play out inequalities even today. What right do we have to say that an imaginary line — a national border — determines whether children deserve basic human rights? This is not about politics, this is not about economics, this is about fundamental humanity.’”
Thank you for your support in this story as it continues.
Love,
Ang
