In AIDS' wake, new family

The Monitor starts an occasional series on two families who reached out to AIDS orphans.

from the September 26, 2007 edition

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"It is a burden for those grannies who cannot work anymore," says Ms. Mpofu, who works at Roodepoort Child Welfare Society. "It's a burden financially and emotionally to deal with the fact that ... these mothers are dying and they're leaving their children behind, and the government isn't doing anything about it."

Not surprisingly, Olga makes every penny count. In addition to her monthly salary, she receives 590 rand ($84) apiece for the three younger children of her late sister Nono. But even with the 1,400 rand ($200) that her husband gets from his new job as a security guard, the family's $552 a month is $55 per person per month, below the World Bank poverty line of $2 a day.

Olga's home, a four-room tin shack built on land bought by her late mother, was spacious for a family of four, but for a family of 10, it's cramped. The government electric company has extended wires into her neighborhood, but hasn't connected those wires to the homes. Water lines have reached her street, but Olga had to pay to have a spigot installed in her yard. Her family uses an outhouse in the backyard.

The day is long and begins early, as Olga and Elizabeth, her aunt's oldest daughter, bathe, dress, and feed the younger children before school. Weekdays, Pontsho stays at his workplace; on weekends, he provides discipline and encouragement.

Bullied as a child because she didn't have an education, Olga says she pushes her kids to study. "That's why I take these kids," she says, "that's why I push these kids.... I don't want these kids to be like me. I don't want these kids to grow up without education."

It's a hard life, but Olga says her decision to take her family's children hasn't affected her relationship with Pontsho.

On the day her sister died, Olga gave him an escape clause. "I had to be honest," she recalls. "I told Pontsho if he doesn't love my sister's kids, it's better the marriage must end. And then Pontsho said to me, 'No, my love, don't say that, because you don't know inside my heart. I will love these kids like I love you and yours.' "

Pontsho laughs when he thinks of that day. "Our life now," he says, "it's getting up where we can control it now." By eating lower-cost staple food, such as ground corn paste, Olga and Pontsho can set aside a bit of money each month.

"What we have to know is, those kids, they must attend school, and after school they have to go to [high school], to go up to the university to be someone one day. We have to save money for them."

Olga's foster children know they have been given a second chance. After her mother's death, relatives "didn't love us, they just called us names," says Bulelwa, a seventh-grader and the youngest daughter of Olga's aunt. "If they cook, they don't give us food equal." But in Olga's home, "[W]hen I got here, [Olga], she give us equal food, she doesn't call us names. She treat us equal like her children."

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Six of the kids play outside the family's tin home. Melanie Stetson Freeman - staff A young family suddenly grows