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No Quiet Old Age for South Africa’s Grannies

CAPE TOWN, Mar 2 2011 - Grannies are indispensable in South Africa. They may have been hoping for a restful old age, but the AIDS epidemic has seen them taking on motherhood for a second time, caring for grandchildren whose parents have died of the disease.

Despite her aching joints, 76-year-old Thandiwe Matzinga moves swiftly through the small corrugated iron home she now shares with three of her grandchildren: twin boys (15) and a seven-year-old girl whose mothers died of AIDS. Matzinga supports them and herself on government grants of 300 euro per month.

Matzinga raised nine kids of her own, three of whom have died of AIDS. She’s one of South Africa’s many grannies who care for their grandchildren.

South Africa has been hit hard by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Some 5.5 million people – around 18 percent of its population – are infected. According to U.N. figures for 2007, there are 1.4 million AIDS orphans in the country, 64 percent of them being raised by their grandparents, usually single grannies.

In a community centre near her home in the township Khayelitsha outside Cape Town, Matzinga takes her place in a circle of wrinkled faces. Talking in the Xhosa language, the women share stories about how it has been for them to lose their children. They are part of the organisation Grandmothers Against Poverty and AIDS (GAPA) that has around 500 members.

All these ladies thought their kids would take care of them when they would be old, but instead the tables have turned. “A lot of these grannies have five to 10 mouths to feed from their old age pension,” says Vivienne Budaza, director of the organisation.

“Their kids are dying like flies,” she sighs.

The grannies get together regularly in the GAPA offices for mutual support; there they discuss their burdens and the disease that is destroying their families.

“The grandmothers know that you contract HIV/AIDS via sex,” says Budaza. “But there are still myths and misunderstandings. A lot of grannies, for example, don’t understand that there are kids who are HIV-positive. How can they have the disease if they never had sex? We then need to explain that a kid can contract the virus while in the womb.”

It’s both a social as well as a financial struggle for the grannies to make ends meet. HIV/AIDS is still stigmatised in South Africa.

“When my neighbours heard that kids of mine died of the disease, they didn’t dare to use the same communal toilet as me,” Matzinga says. But slowly, she feels, this is changing. “More and more families around me are hit by HIV/AIDS. There are more and more grannies in the same situation asking for my help.”

Another granny taking care of lots of children is 71-year- old Nothemba Mdaka. But her small home is temporarily quiet. She has sent her grandkids and great-grandkids away because one of her daughters is dying of HIV/AIDS in the back bedroom. She doesn’t want the children to see the suffering. It is her third daughter who will die of the disease.

Mdaka raised five grandchildren and is now raising five great-grandchildren while her grandchildren are looking for work. Bringing up teenagers has been difficult for her. “A lot of youngsters in the townships use alcohol and drugs and there is a lot of crime,” says Budaza of GAPA. “And the number of teenage pregnancies is so high.”

One of Mdaka’s grandchildren had her first child when she was 15. She is 20 now and has three kids. “She says she wants to have healthy children before she gets HIV- positive,” says Mdaka.

At first she didn’t dare talk to her grandchildren about sex, but now she even hands out condoms. “We need to be open about this. Otherwise this killing disease will never stop.”

*Published under an agreement with Street News Service.