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‘Paying School Fees’ February 2007 Hilary Lofink |
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| In a rural area 20 miles outside
of Harare, school is letting out and most of the children, the majority of
whom are orphans, walking home wave at Natalie as we drive past - and she
yells out of the window, greeting them by name: ‘Oh that’s little Manyara she’s my favorite.’ Suddenly we pull onto the side of the road and next to us is a muddy path disappearing into a sea of corn plants. This is where Talent and his sister Freejoy live with their Gogo, the Shona word for grandmother. We wander down a muddy path until we arrive at the thatched-roofed mud huts seen in the distance. Quietly, Gogo comes down the path behind us, very old and stooped over – and with a very sweet, gentle, smiley face. |
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I introduce myself to this wonderful old grandmother and Nat explains to us
that it is customary for visitors to have a seat outside the hut and talk
for a little while.
She also explains that the corn plants towering above us are all grown from seed that she purchased and gave to the orphans. She told them that they had to till the soil themselves, digging it with a very rudimentary farming tool called a budza – and when the plants started to grow, she promised to find them some fertilizer, a rare commodity in this country. She found it.
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| At twelve years of age, Talent is
not only the ‘man of the house’, he is also in charge of kitchen duty.
While we were there, he disappeared into the thatched hut designated as the
kitchen and tended to some very bare-looking bones that he was smoking on a
fire. Further down the dirt road, we stop at St. Peter’s School to pay school fees. On the way Nat tells us about a boy at the school who is one of two ‘child head-of-the-household’ situations she has in her group. His name is Kuda. His father died 2 years ago when he was 15, his mother died 5 years ago when he was 12. What a remarkable person. |
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He’s now 17 and he lives alone with his 14-year old sister, Chiedza and his 10-year old sister, Mercy. Mercy is the only orphan Nat supports who they know has AIDS and Nat gives Kuda money to take Mercy to the state hospital in Harare once a week to get her retro-viral medicines. Last December, Chiedza was raped. Instead of searching the guy out and beating him up, which would be the normal modus operandi, Kuda went to the police to report it. They told him to take his sister to the hospital to be checked out-– while they arrested the bastard and put him in jail. |
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An interesting situation is going on at the school - the teachers are all on strike, demanding better pay. They currently earn the equivalent of $25 per month! The children are all attending school in spite of this, all in immaculately clean, pressed school uniforms. They have no running water or electricity in their huts and yet everything they wear looks so clean and well-cared for. The washing of their laundry is done in a nearby river; I have no idea how they manage to make their clothes look so well pressed.
Nat asks Kuda if we can see his house and he’s happy to show us. Nat explains to us that this is unusual because there is usually a level of embarrassment caused by how sparse their existence is. |
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The small house is immaculately clean with the ground around the outside of the two small buildings swept beautifully. I asked Kuda how he manages to do all of this before he goes to school as he walks to school both ways – at least half an hour each way. He said that he wakes up at 4.45 each morning in order to get everything done at home and still be at school by 7.30. His house was built by his father before he died. It consists of a small building with 2 tiny bedrooms and a small sitting room. The kitchen is a separate thatched mud hut. An outhouse sits a distance away from the house.
Kuda shows us that on top of the roof is a very small, very basic solar panel. He has this hooked up to a car battery in his room. He has run wires from this to a light bulb to enable him to do his homework – and since he is also a pretty normal 17-year old, he’s proud to show us how he has also hooked a wire from the car battery to an old, salvaged Fischer Price tape recorder. (The tape recorder used to belong to Nat’s young boys.) With a sparkle in his eye, he turns on his very teen-age music! |
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Nat gives Kuda a ten-pound bag of mealie meal (corn meal) before she leaves – this way, he doesn’t have to carry it home (an hour-long walk) after their regular, once-a-week Friday afternoon group get-together. The ten-pound bag of mealie meal is used to make a thick porridge and is enough to feed the three children for one month.
As we leave, Kuda asks us if we’d like to meet his Gogo – and we all then drive a couple of miles further down a dirt road. Kuda’s Gogo and another African woman are sitting on the ground outside her mud hut unraveling yarn from a pile of old sweaters. The yarn is being reused to knit a blanket!
The situation they have here is so much better for the three of them than living in an orphanage |
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