Tears over AIDS, Inequality in Africa 

By Debra Black, Toronto Star

May 26, 2008

Swaziland

Debra Black recently went to South Africa and Swaziland to report on two Canadian grandmothers who were part of a 12-member delegation with the Stephen Lewis Foundation. Their mission: to study the impact of AIDS.

Two young children peek inside a community centre in Nkomazi in South Africa earlier this year, where a delegation of Canadian grandmothers meet with their counterparts in Africa. 

Dressed in colourful sarongs, shirts and headscarves, about 1,500 women, mostly rural grandmothers, march along the city streets waving signs that proclaim: "Grandmothers, the Heart of the Nation" and "Grandmothers and Their Unpaid Work." As they parade out of Jubilee Park following a marching band, the women, some with walking sticks and others carrying babies on their back, sing in Swazi: "We are tired of men beating women in Swaziland." They raise their fists and punch the air, shouting: Phezukomkhono – "We are moving forward." 

Groups of men gather on the sidewalk, yelling at the women to go home. "Return to the kitchen and cooking!" says one. Another shouts: "Go home, old women!" 

The insults anger feminist Carole Holmes, a 62-year-old grandmother from Niagara-on-the-Lake, one of a delegation of 12 Canadian grandmothers travelling across sub-Saharan Africa with the Stephen Lewis Foundation.

In 2006, the foundation launched the Grandmothers to Grandmothers Campaign, allowing Holmes to visit the projects the foundation funds and to take the stories of the African grandmothers and orphans that she meets back to Canada.

The march is part of a two-day event on women's rights and gender equality for rural grandmothers, organized by Swaziland for Positive Living (SWAPOL), a grassroots organization of more than 1,000 HIV positive women. It operates with the help of a $100,000 grant from the foundation. 

Holmes, brown-haired and petite, walks hand-in-hand with one Swazi grandmother, helping her to climb two steep hills. They pause frequently.

Although they do not speak the same language, they have developed a bond – grandmother to grandmother.

"For me, that's hopeful," Holmes says of the march. "It's just with what we've seen over the last week or so, you know the reality of their lives is very tough. And I think it will be tough bringing women's rights into their homes."

Women's rights is just one of the huge obstacles these determined grandmothers must face.

AIDS has triggered a viral genocide in this tiny, landlocked nation of about 1.1 million. And as in so many countries across Africa, the grandmothers bear the burden. They have watched their children die and thousands are caring for many of the 130,000 AIDS orphans, a number that is expected to grow to about 200,000 by 2010. 

Twenty-six per cent of reproductive adults have it. Forty per cent of all pregnant women are HIV positive. And the prevalence rate in the overall population is about 19 per cent. A similar prevalence rate in Canada would translate into 6.2 million of our 33 million citizens. Life expectancy in Swaziland has dropped from 60 to 31 in a decade. 

For the women of Swaziland, young and old, the despair is palpable. Happiness Nkomo, a 64-year-old grandmother, has lost three children to AIDS. She and her eight grandchildren live in a corrugated metal shack in a village near the Mozambique border. She is articulate and soft-spoken with an easy command of English. 

She grows quiet and short of breath after she hears there are no AIDS orphans in Canada; no grandmothers who must care for dozens of children; no pandemic wiping out a nation. She seems to distrust what she has heard and then turns livid that in Swaziland there is only AIDS and death.

Inside the Mavuso Trade Center, Holmes sits in a sea of Swazi grandmothers; some recline on the floor, others perch on chairs. A feisty Acadian who cut her teeth in the Canadian women's movement, Holmes is outraged when she hears their stories. 

Many Swazi women are not allowed to inherit land and are treated like minors, despite guarantees recently introduced to the constitution, which in some cases can be superseded by customary or tribal rights. "The chief is the ultimate decision maker," Holmes says. "I think there are 365 chiefs and only three are women – and they're acting chiefs. All the men have the final say."

Polygamy, promiscuity and denying women the right to refuse sex or insist on a condom are common. "I think there is something so critical about this pandemic and I think it is being fuelled by a lot of things. Gender inequality is to me one of the major, major things," says Holmes, who in 1981, with a group of women in Halton, began lobbying to have equality rights for women included in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. 

In a small village 10 hours from Kampala, Uganda, near the Rwandan border, Holmes meets Jeska, a 96-year-old grandmother. She watches as the grandmother cowers before her drunken nephew when he comes to visit. Holmes, aware of the signs of child abuse, fears Jeska's 17-year-old granddaughter, who she looks after, may have been sexually abused. Another Swazi grandmother says her granddaughter was raped by a neighbour, who was arrested but released the next day. And another grandmother confesses to taking money from a rapist to hush up the crime.

Tears well in Holmes's eyes when she talks about a grandmother whose son killed himself rather than have his mother watch another child die of AIDS. He doused himself in kerosene and set himself aflame. Holmes was told his suicide note read: "Mom, I don't want you to go through the pain of nursing me." 

The next day, Holmes and Paulette Pelletier-Kelly, another Canadian grandmother who lives on Toronto Island, travel across the parched and empty countryside to Hlatikulu, a tiny, dilapidated village where about 12 grandmothers look after 200 orphans. They are travelling with Siphiwe Hlophe, the founder of SWAPOL, and a nurse on its medical mobile clinic.

Children play in the dirt. Elderly women sit, watching. Teens chat in the shade of a tree. Something is eerily missing – a generation of men and women aged 20 to 40.

"You just feel, how can they ever possibly cope," says Holmes. "What's going to happen when those grandmothers die? Those children aren't grown yet ... Their grandmothers aren't going to be around when those tiny ones are teenagers."

Florah Dlamin, who participated in the march in Manzini, thanks the Canadians for coming to their village. "I hope you remember the Swazi gogos (grandmothers)," she says. "When you go home and mobilize the Canadian grandmothers please pass on our gratitude. Tell them we love them." 

Holmes shows the children and grandmothers photographs of her home, her daughter, her granddaughter and her husband John. They are captivated by the snow, particularly a picture of Holmes, in a snowsuit, making a snow angel.

In a turquoise painted home with a faded sense of grandeur from a time gone by, Holmes confronts the face of AIDS. 

Lydia Mndzebele, 38, lies in bed. Too ill to care for herself, she has moved into her sister's home. Earlier in the day she fell getting out of bed and hurt her knee. A gauze curtain in the window protects her from the noon sun. Bedridden for the past three months, Mndzebele's face and body are bloated. Her hair is twisted in knots. She was diagnosed with AIDS last November and started taking anti-retroviral drugs, but they don't appear to be working. She seems distracted and preoccupied and is surprised when Holmes, Pelletier-Kelly and the nurse enter her room. The nurse checks her blood pressure and her temperature. Mndzebele's sister Tsabile Simelane, a 54-year-old grandmother looking after 12 AIDS orphans, watches over her protectively. Holmes asks if it's okay to rub Mndzebele's feet. Mndzebele is taken aback, but nods. Holmes begins to give a foot massage. Pelletier-Kelly joins her. Mndzebele utters a quiet sigh. Soon it is time to go and Holmes and Pelletier-Kelly hug Mndzebele and leave. 

Three weeks after their visit, Mndzebele died. 

"Don't cry, please," says Hlophe, who is HIV positive herself, in an interview with the Star. "Twenty years we have been crying and our tears have now run dry. Because you cry and cry and cry and nothing happens." 

Before her trip, Holmes promised to spend a year speaking and fundraising for the Stephen Lewis Foundation. But she now wants to do more – to lobby Ottawa to do more. 

"I have become more passionate; more energetic. (This trip) has energized me," she says. "Overwhelmed sometimes, but not to the point I feel I can't act. It just gave me a booster shot. 

"I really think we can get the grandmother movement going ... we can be a large voter group to make a difference to say we care about Africa. We made some promises to Africa and we can get Canada to keep those promises.

"Now that I am here and faced these women and said we will ensure your voices will be heard in Canada, I don't know if I can do it ... Can I be true to their voice? Can I get across their desperateness and the potential that is there to help?"

At home in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Holmes is determined to try, and prepares to begin speaking and fundraising across Ontario. "There is nothing mediocre or medium about Africa. To me everything is in the extreme. Extreme joy; extreme pain; extreme emotion – tragedy and triumphs." 

Despite the despair and endless river of tears she witnessed, Holmes is hopeful. "I believe Africa can solve its problems. I think one person can make a difference." 

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