As home-based care volunteers, these women sacrifice many hours to nurse, wash and care for those who are bedridden due to illness, in many cases Aids-related diseases.

“You have to really prepare yourself mentally, otherwise it is too strenuous to deal with the pain, poverty and heartbreak,” says Thoko Mtsweni, co-ordinator for the Philisa care programme in Mzinoni. “You go to the house where you have to sit down, talk, make jokes and talk some more before you can start your work,” she said.

Over 20 volunteers visit homes to wash and clean their patients, eventually training the caregiver in the home ‘€“ a daughter, mother, child or grandchild ‘€“ to care for the patient. Jostina Dladla (59) is visited three days a week by Nokuthula Dube.

On the other days she is left to her own devices. Confined to a wheelchair, Dladla is unable to go to the toilet or even feed herself. Her family leaves her in a part of the house that is run down, with huge gaping holes in the roof where the rain and cold streams in. She sleeps on the floor in the bare room. Sometimes she gets food from her brother’€™s wife. She has told Mtsweni that her brother wheels her to the pension payout point every month where he collects and keeps her disability pension.  

Attempts by Mtsweni to get Dladla into an old age home have been met with resistance from the brother. In another house “Granny” Nkambula (82) has been caring for her bedridden daughter Johanna (60). Johanna suffered a stroke two years ago. “It was very difficult for me before these women came to help me. Now at least there are people who can wash my daughter and show me how to prevent bedsores,” she says.  

Another project run by Mtsweni and the MPSA is attempting to establish some form of care and shelter for the more than 70 children in Mzinoni orphaned by the AIDS epidemic.  

About 35 children meet at a rundown shelter at an empty hostel where an unemployed teacher keeps them busy.

At lunchtime they disperse, with no food and in many cases no place to go for the night. Tapsile, Zweli, Abraham, Funega and Anele are the first to arrive in the mornings. The siblings have no shoes and their tattered, dirty clothing shows signs of spending a night on a floor.  

Sitting on empty drums or crates, the children are eager to learn, happy to receive some form of attention. “But the worst is at lunchtime when we have to tell them, once again, that there is no food for them,” says Mtsweni. “But what can we do, we have to go on. We have to hope that something will happen and this nightmare will come to an end.”  

Anyone wishing to assist with setting up a classroom for the children by donating furniture, other teaching material or food is asked to contact Mtsweni on 082-713-5082 or 017-647-6840.