The Rest of Thembi’s Story

…placed the dough in a double-boiler pan to steam on the stove. It
might have been the end of a happy story, but Thembi had
more to tell.As we settled back into our place on the couch,
she began describing the next chapter of her life.
One morning when she was working, Thembi received a
phone call from a relative. One of Thembi’s older sisters had
died, leaving four children behind. By now Thembi was visiting
her mother and older siblings regularly, slowly healing the
relationships she had missed in her childhood. This death
came as a heavy blow. Thembi went home to her mother’s
house and paid for her sister’s funeral.
As the visitors returned home, Thembi found herself in
her mother’s home, holding in her arms the youngest orphan
nephew, still just a baby.As she stared into his round eyes, she
saw herself there.Had anyone cradled her like this? Had anyone
sung to her? Was this baby destined to experience the
same abandonment and fear that marked her childhood?
When Thembi went home to Durban, she carried with
her this youngest orphan boy. She resolved to give the child
the best she could.As a single professional woman barely out
of high school, she felt ill equipped to care for the baby. She
hired a woman to care for him during the day and then later
brought him back to her mother’s home where the baby’s
other three orphaned siblings lived. Thembi sent money regularly
to pay for a caregiver to help her mother.
Then another sister died. “And another one die. And another
one die.And another one die.”As Thembi repeated the
words, tears pooled in her eyes. She stopped when her voice
gave out.
Thembi returned home for each sister’s death and paid
most of the cost of the funerals. By 2005, all but one of her ten
siblings had died. At the time, no one in her rural area was
speaking of HIV.

“I don’t know why they died,”Thembi said. “Maybe it was
HIV. They had runny stomachs, and rashes, and sores. So I
think so, but I don’t know because we didn’t test anyone.”
Finally only one sister remained. This last sister had four
children. “The last one was born of mother’s rape,” Thembi
explained.The woman’s husband had committed suicide just
a year before the rape. “After she was raped,” Thembi said of
her sister, “she was disturbed in the head. She hated everything
in this world. She left the oldest sons caring for the cows.
They ate food from the rubbish can.They slept outside.They
did not go to school.”
Thembi and her mother resisted their suspicion that the
woman was losing her mind. “It was difficult to understand.
She was clean. She spoke positive things. She was not like the
other crazy people you meet. But she dug a hole in the middle
of her house. I don’t know why.And she would start building
a room and not finish it.And other things.Maybe because
she didn’t get any help when she was being raped.”
Then one day while Thembi was visiting her mother, to
their amazement, two boys strolled onto their property. The
oldest was fifteen years old, the younger only ten.When they
reached the house, Thembi suddenly recognized them as her
sister’s boys, exhausted and caked in dust.
“I cried tears when I saw them,” Thembi said. “From the
house of my sister to the house of my mother, it was a fortyfive
minute taxi ride. And they walked. One boy’s foot was
swollen.They had no shoes. It was amazing. I looked at them,
and you could see, they had big heads and big stomachs. You
could see the bones in them. I just wanted to give them all
my food. I kept saying, ‘Take this food. Take this food. Take
this food.’”
The boys never returned to their mother’s home. They
stayed with Thembi’s mother and the growing crowd of or-
phans. Thembi went to fetch the boys’ two younger sisters,
bringing the total to nine nieces and nephews at her mother’s
home. One year later, Thembi’s last sister came to stay at the
home, too. By now her condition was more than a subtle mental
disturbance. She refused food and medicine, and she barely
spoke. Finally on February 9, 2005, she passed away, the last
of Thembi’s ten siblings.
Until then, Thembi had tried to be strong. She had held
her job, sent money for the children and her mother, and paid
for funeral after funeral. Now something snapped. She could
carry no more. “After the funeral, I was just sobbing and sobbing.
We didn’t have any money left. Nothing.We couldn’t
even pay for the funeral, not even a mortuary. We just
wrapped her in a blanket to bury her.”Thembi did not return
to work. She stayed at her mother’s home, crying and crying.
“I was like crazy.None of my friends wanted to talk to me because
I was just crying.”
Without her knowing it, one of those friends, a woman
from Thembi’s church, took a bold step on Thembi’s behalf.
She approached a white man who had recently bought a large
plot of land in the area.His vision was to build a village for orphans.
Just fourteen days after the funeral, this man arrived at
Thembi’s house, followed by two more cars filled withAmerican
volunteers.
Thembi began to giggle as she explained the scene.Nearly
two dozen Americans climbed out of the cars, snapping pictures,
touching the frightened children, roaming everywhere.
“I was cooking butternut and mealies (corn porridge),”
Thembi said. “I was so embarrassed to open the pot.That was
all the food we had, and I didn’t want them to see it.”
Piecing together a conversation with her limited English
and the white visitors’ limited Zulu, Thembi came to understand
that theAmericans had come offering to take Thembi’s
family to the orphan village. The foreigners would return in
two days to fetch them if they agreed.
That was when Thembi made the bravest decision I can
imagine. Knowing just a few words of English, she packed up
the six youngest children, climbed into the van with the foreigners,
and moved into the orphanage as her nieces’ and
nephews’ caregiver. There she
learned to speak English fluently
and grew to love welcoming the
foreign volunteers who come to
stay at the orphanage. She also
became the caretaker for another
three children who also
call her “Mom.”
“And that’s where I live.
That’s my story.” Thembi
opened her hands palm up and
shrugged. By now the bread was
steaming in a pot on my stove, and a warm smell filled the
room. I clasped Thembi’s hands in mine and we sat in silence
for a long moment.
In the coming months I began visiting Thembi every
Wednesday for a lesson in speaking Zulu. Later we spent several
mornings a month together working with a beaded craft
organization. One weekend she invited me to visit her
mother’s home, and I met for the first time the grinning
woman I already knew well fromThembi’s story.Thembi and
I came bearing a sack full of grocery store fried chicken, so as
not to burden her mother, but the tireless old woman insisted
on killing and cooking her own chicken for us anyway.
The orphanage lay in an epicenter of HIV and a crisis of
deaths. Estimates placed the HIV rate in the 30 km radius at
around 40 percent of the adult population. That made it
about the highest HIV rate in South Africa and among the
highest in the world, but by no means the only place in the
world experiencing the terrible crush of HIV.On the surface,
you might not have noticed it.The orphan village housed only
a few dozen children, and it was a last resort for most of these
children. If they had grandmothers, aunts, or neighbors who
could provide for them and keep them safe from abuse or
neglect, they would stay with family.Volunteers in the community,
called home-based caregivers, often stepped in to care
for their sick and dying neighbors and help orphans find social
services or nonprofit help. For many of these caregivers, their
lives were not easy either. They faced difficult choices. They
gave food from their own tables. Meanwhile people in the
prime of life all around them—teachers, nurses, shopkeepers,
mothers, and fathers—silently passed away. The community
was stretched to its limits.
While the orphanage almost literally saved her life,
Thembi hoped to move into a home of her own.Through volunteers
at the orphanage, she collected donations to build a
six-room house for herself and the twelve she now considered
her children.
As I wrote this, the walls were built, the doors were windows
are in, and only the roof was lacking. The move would
not be easy. She and her aging mother would be hard pressed
to earn money and care for the children. Thembi had nearly
completed a local computer course, and she was earning some
income through a Zulu beaded crafts organization, but even
with some welfare money it would be a stretch to feed the
large family. Even if she could leave the children while she
found work, her home was in a rural area where job opportunities
are few.
As a rare thirty-year-old woman without a boyfriend or
children of her own,Thembi learned to rely heavily on prayer
and faith in God. Her story had no prince and fairy godmother,
but one good God is shaping a happy ending not only
for Thembi but also for the second generation of Cinderella
children that she cares for. “I keep trusting God, and I don’t
give up,” she told me. “I open my Bible, and I sing.And I like
to pray very loud,” she laughed. “And God is very faithful. I
know what He did for me.”