The story below is one of a series that Greg and I were commissioned to produce at the start of autumn 2011 in South Africa. Text by Greg and stills by me. All names have been changed to protect the identity of the people involved.
Every school day morning, Daniel wakes early to make sure he has clean, pressed clothes to wear to school, then he carefully prepares his lunchbox.
While most 16 year olds have their likes or dislikes, Daniel harbours deeper concerns: if his skaftin or lunchbox just has maize meal and wild spinach, he fears he will be found out as an orphan.
Daniel sees other kids teased mercilessly and ostracized for being deemed orphans, “I am afraid they will laugh at me or treat me badly. I see it happen to other children.” Even those who have a parent, but are too poor to have meat with their pap, are called parentless.
Daniel changes out of his school uniform when he returns from school.
It seems odd that in Limpopo, a province where 83%* of all children live in poverty, not having a piece of meat in one’s lunchbox, or R5 to spend at the tuck-shop, would mark you for ridicule and isolation.
While Daniel’s experience at school seems unkind, his life has recently improved, after a disastrous detour.
His father died in 2005, when the boy was just 10, but it had little impact on the boy as his elder half-sister Priscilla puts it, “He just gave my mother a child,” and Daniel’s father neither assisted with money nor ever visited his son.
Their mother was the center of their family life. She worked as a hawker, selling tomatoes in the nearby town of Thohoyandou, the capital of the former homeland Venda. She would leave home by seven in the morning and return twelve or thirteen hours later. Despite the hardship of her life, she managed to save a little money and also applied for and got a state-funded RDP house.
In 2009, life dealt the family a blow – their mother, just 42, died from an Aids-related illness after a long spell in hospital. The siblings were alone.
In such cases, customarily the grandmother on the maternal side will take charge, putting the children under her care. And while Priscilla does not speak freely about what happened in the aftermath of her mother’s death, Ramboni Mudau, a private social worker who has been assisting them, fills in the gaps,
“The family wanted her mother’s savings to pay for a big funeral, to raise their social status. Priscilla refused. The family also wanted to sell their mother’s house and keep the money.”
Again Priscilla balked. The family accused the 18-year-old of ‘acting like an adult’ while she was still a girl and tried to force her to accede.
She did not, but she was in no position to look after an ill ten-year-old brother.
An aunt came to fetch Daniel and took him to her home. Here, he expected to be cared for in a loving family environment, with three cousins as playmates. But it was not to be, says Rambane, “They treated him like a maid. They beat him and made him responsible for ensuring there was always water – and the (communal) tap was far from the house.”
The aunt was made the beneficiary of Daniel’s child grant, but apparently did not use the money to either properly feed or clothe the boy.
Worse yet, even though the boy was sickly, the aunt did not take him to the clinic. In light of his mother’s death to Aids, his chances of being infected himself were high. His deteriorating health made him struggle to perform his tasks and the beatings increased. At school he was always tired, and some of the telltale signs of a compromised immune system like eye infections impacted severely on his performance. Sometimes he could not help falling asleep in class.
“I failed grade four because my writing was not good. I failed grade six because of eye problems – I couldn’t see what was on the board, and then I also failed grade seven.”
The principal was incensed, accusing the boy of being lazy, and wanted to expel him.
Daniel was not properly clothed, had no shoes, and when he asked his aunt for these things she told him, “We are not the ones who killed your mother. Go ask the grave and ask your mother.”
His elder sister became more and more concerned and turned to the only people she thought could help her – the social workers from Isibindi, a private community-based care, and protection intervention project. Rambani recalls going to see Daniel at the aunt’s house, “The boy was malnourished and sickly. We told the aunt we were taking him away because she was misusing his child grant.”
And so a very ill and malnourished Daniel returned to his mother’s house. For his sister, it was a pending nightmare, the boy was so ill that she had no idea how to care for him. She told Rambani that if her brother were HIV positive, she would kill herself.
There were even more difficulties – the aunt refused to relinquish the grant, and so once Daniel had been tested and found to be HIV positive, Isibindi applied for a foster care grant. It took two and a half years of frustrations and bureaucratic obduracy from the very social workers and tribal authorities that were meant to assist, before Priscilla could receive the grant on behalf of her brother. In that time, they survived off food parcels and the kindness of Isibindi, while the aunt kept receiving the grant.
Daniel’s grant pays out R710 a month, and will be in place until he turns 18. He is alternately eligible for a disability grant – worth R1250, but this has to be reviewed every year.
Today, Daniel is small compared to his peers, a result of stunting due to malnutrition. But he is cheerful and optimistic about his future, as with regular food, his school marks have improved, “I want to be a pilot, or a doctor, so that I can help people who are sick and give them medicine,” he smiles shyly.
His best friend at school is Daniel’s ally in working out strategies to keep Daniel’s orphan status a secret. They share lunchboxes and pocket money to buy ikota, the township favourite - a quarter loaf of bread hollowed out and filled with chips, polony (balony) and spicy mango atchar.
View the Images here.