Sister Della Rose has had a taxing day. It’s 3pm and her day is far from over. The mother superior has just returned from taking residents to the hospital.
She exchanges words with her driver and hops out of the car. Hot on her heels is Tsepo, babbling to himself as he does. “Sister! Sister!” he says in his typically urgent tone. Sr Della Rose turns to the mentally disabled Tsepo to find him wielding a wooden club. She wrestles it from the 26-year-old, who towers over her, and then tosses it into a flower bed scolding him as she strides towards the rectory. Tsepo looks mortally wounded. He scowls at her before eventually wandering off, muttering as he goes.
He makes his way to the courtyard outside the men’s residence, where he finds his friends seated in wheelchairs and on plastic chairs parked in the winter sun. Many of the men are like Tsepo. Some are physically disabled, others are blind, many have TB and most are HIV positive. The one thing they all have in common is that they are alone in this world. Rejected by their relatives and shunned by their communities, they are outcasts – the most marginalized members of society and God only knows what would have become of them were it not for the Missionaries of Charity.
The order, which was founded by Mother Teresa, is committed to giving “wholehearted and free service to the poorest of the poor”. In 1988 Mother Theresa went to South Africa for her first and only visit to the country to open a home in Khayelitsha, a township on the outskirts of Cape Town.
Khayelitsha, which means “new home” in Xhosa, is said to be the second-largest township in South Africa and home to about 1.5 million people – the vast majority of which are the poorest of the poor, living on less than $1.25 a day.
The Missionaries of Charity provides care – mostly palliative – to 32 men, 29 women and 47 children in this community. Most of the children are orphans and 40 out of 47 are HIV positive.
Mother-to-child-transmission rates in South Africa are exceptionally high, with about 70 000 babies born with HIV every year.
South Africa has the largest Aids epidemic in the world. About 17 percent of the world’s HIV positive population live in South Africa – that’s 5.7 million HIV positive people. And while South Africa now has the largest antiretroviral therapy programme in the world, access to treatment is low, with fewer than one million people receiving the necessary care.
For the past three years, SA’s population growth rate has slowed, while the number of people living with HIV has increased. The population rose 1 percent to 49.99 million in the year to June 2009.
Tragically, there are 148 000 child-headed households in South Africa and between 1.5 million and three million children who have lost one or both of their parents to Aids.
It is in this context that the Missionaries of Charity, and other non-profit organisations in South Africa, work. It can be terribly bleak and the burnout rate is high.
But if you visited the Missionaries of Charity in Khayelitsha you would not say so. There’s a peace that prevails over the property and to watch the nuns at work is to witness love in action.
I will never forget my first visit to their home. It was during the Fifa World Cup. A couple of foreign journalists expressed an interest in the work of FoodBank South Africa and it fell to me to host them on a visit to FoodBank's warehouse near Khayelitsha and then to call on a few of the NGOs that FoodBank supports.
I had met Sr Gloria, a delightful diminutive Mauritian nun, at an agency meeting a few months prior and was impacted by her warmth and humility. But I never knew much about her order or the work that she and her fellow sisters have given themselves to.
Schools in South Africa were closed for five weeks during the soccer tournament, so the children were all home the day we dropped in.
Little Sr Gloria was looking after the children that day – 40-odd kids ranging in age from birth to 12 years old. One adult to 40 children is a dangerous ratio, but Sr Gloria was all sweetness and laughs. Perhaps taking their cue from her, the children were too.
Of course they did what children do: with the least bit of encouragement they climbed up our bodies as if we were jungle gyms; readily posed for photos; showed off their circus tricks and sang and danced with gusto. But they also nestled into vacant laps, broke open hearts and connected with each of us in the deepest place.
They sang a few songs of praise. The chorus of one went something like this: “We are blessed! We are blessed! We are blessed because Jesus saved us.”
These little ones, who have a life-sentence hanging over them; no parents; and such limited prospects … singing “we are blessed”? I began to unravel.
What does it really mean to be blessed? Or to be poor?
On my second visit, I ask Sr Gloria: how does she do it? She shrugs her tiny shoulders: “They have become my own,” she says, breezily. “I just like to be here, to be one of them.”
It must be so painful to always be losing people who you have grown to love. “Surely,” says Sr Della Rose in her native Indian accent. “It is. We become their mothers. They can’t do much for themselves. They say: be my mind, my hands, my feet, my mouth. Be my mother.
“It is great to be this for another.”
I look at all the need around me and I see all of the people who are standing in the gap. People like Sr Della Rose and Sr Gloria who have discovered the joy of living for the other. They are the champions that FoodBank is partnering with in the fight against hunger and a host of associated social ills.
FoodBank supplies food to almost 1,100 agencies countrywide via food banks in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth, Durban and Pietermaritzburg. In its first year in operation, FoodBank SA distributed to the hungry 5.6 million kilograms of food and essential non-food groceries valued at R76 million. FoodBank gives the Missionaries of Charity about 430kg of food a month.
• Angelique Ardé is the former communications coordinator of FoodBank SA
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