In South Africa, AIDS’ Toll Also Felt in Schools

A primary school principal in Soweto has many roles: social worker, grief and sexual abuse counselor and charity worker organizing food parcels and secondhand clothes. Even, occasionally, funeral director.

In June, Gladys Legodi buried Kamogelo Mongae, an 8-year-old student who had lived in a leaking shack in this township on the outskirts of Johannesburg. The boy’s aunt chased his mother and him from her house because both were suffering from AIDS.

“You would cry if you saw the place. It was like a small kennel. It was full of holes,” Legodi said.

One day, the boy did not show up for the breakfast she gave him daily.

There was nowhere to hold the funeral except Thusanani Primary School.

Legodi, 56, dresses in bright, flowing garments. She keeps her hair tightly braided; her amber eyes are calm and her smile is serene. She has been teaching for 33 years, including 17 as principal. As she walks through the school grounds, her arm always seems to be around a child’s shoulders.

She has seen AIDS devastate her classrooms. One in every 10 students has been left without parents; most orphans also have been abandoned by their relatives. One in five live in dire poverty.

South African officials say about 6 million of the country’s 44 million people are infected with the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS, and 40% of childhood deaths are caused by the disease.

The United Nations agency fighting HIV/AIDS estimates that the epidemic has orphaned 1.1 million children here, and that by 2010 there will be 18.4 million children orphaned by acquired immune deficiency syndrome in sub-Saharan Africa. Orphans are vulnerable to sexual abuse and HIV infection, but few get the antiretroviral drugs that could keep them alive.

With no one else to care about those orphaned, the responsibility often falls to teachers. Sometimes older siblings give up their own dreams of education and advancement to take on a parent’s role. Other older orphans find themselves cast adrift.

Legodi sometimes arranges funerals for parents of her pupils. She sees children too weak and ill to learn or play, clearly suffering from AIDS, but who haven’t been tested because their parents or guardians are ashamed or afraid. When they get sick at school, there is no place for them except a rough, gray blanket on the floor behind her desk.

The atmosphere in classrooms has changed, said one teacher, Bally Dube. Some children weep in class. Some sleep at their desks. Some, with a parent dying at home, cannot concentrate. Some orphans, left in the care of their grandmothers, tell Dube that they are afraid the older women will die and leave them alone. Some confide that they have no food.

“You used to teach happy children, without feeling that someone was sick. The behavior of the children in the classroom is no longer what it used to be,” Dube said.

Among the students are two brothers, Kgotsofalo, 11, and Lucky, 8. Before she died last year, Mamaila Mokhola told her sons they would suffer without her. Kgotsofalo still cries. Lucky just stares into space. “He is always withdrawn. He can sit alone not saying anything to anybody. He always looks so tired,” Legodi said. “At times I cry alone when I think about them.”

The two boys have an older brother, Tabatso, 19, a slow learner. Without their mother’s protection, the brothers were forced to move recently after a violent neighbor terrorized them. Their only food and help are from school.

But during school vacations, orphans might go days without food. Legodi and Dube try to arrange food parcels, but the food usually runs out well before the vacation does.

At times, there is an almost desperate pathos to Legodi’s efforts. Seeing an ad for a supermarket giveaway of a $150 Christmas basket, she busily collects and sends off entry forms, hoping to win and make Christmas parcels for the children. She has borrowed pots to cook school lunches.

The school has no teachers’ room, library or nurse’s office. A dig through Legodi’s office would unearth evidence of 17 years of dedication. The principal has photographed every school triumph and commemorated every loss.

“It’s very difficult. What we usually do is dig deep into our own pockets to buy what’s necessary. I always thank God that I have a staff that have giving hearts. Some bring groceries ... and some buy children shoes,” Legodi said.

Much depends on how willing individual principals and teachers are to go beyond their normal roles. Both Legodi and Dube said they grew up poor.

“I was also an abandoned child,” Legodi said. “We had it tough. I was brought up by my granny. I don’t want these children to suffer as I did.”

But even if they are willing to help, educators can reach only the children who come to school. A recent Human Rights Watch report on South Africa, Kenya and Uganda says many poor children have dropped out of school.

“Governments have failed to address the unique disadvantages faced by AIDS-affected children, with the result that these children are less likely than their peers to enroll, attend or advance in school,” it says.

In South Africa, households headed by children are eligible for a grant of about $75 a month, but only 2% of those eligible actually get it, the report says.

“Governments seem content to let the poor help the poor, rather than assuming responsibility for children whose families had been decimated by HIV/AIDS,” it said.

Other children have to take on adult roles. Elizabeth Sekese, 18, has cared for two younger brothers since her mother died of AIDS five years ago. After her sister died last year of the virus, she has cared for her sick niece, now 5 and dying of AIDS.

Sekese dreams of an education and a better future, but with no time for homework, she failed school last year.

“I’m not coping at school because I am the one who cleans for my brothers. I cook for them. I’m the mother to my brothers and my sister’s child,” she said through a cascade of tears. “Sometimes I feel like dying. I’ve given up hope. I don’t see a way forward.”

For food, she relies on Soweto’s Sizanani drop-in center for orphans and vulnerable children. The center’s history illustrates how the problem has grown: It began in 2000 with six children; the next year, founder Elizabeth Rapuleng had 20; the next, 60; and the next, 120. By 2004, the number grew to 250, and now she feeds 475 orphans three times a day.

Nomsa Mobaso dropped out of school after her mother died when she was 13.

“I had no uniform, no books. I saw that nobody cared about my education,” she said.

She was thrown out by her relatives and was so hungry she slept with men three times for the equivalent of a few dollars to buy food. She got pregnant and had a son.

Now 15, she depends on another drop-in center for food. She says she hopes to go back to school one day, and find a safe place away from the daily shadow of violence.

“I think of my mother virtually every day,” she said. “If she was here, she would not leave me like this, borrowing clothes from other people, doing things that I should not do.”

Sihle Dway, also 15, lost his mother to AIDS in 2003 and moved into a shack with three older cousins who made him clean, cook, buy them liquor and use a toy pistol to steal cellphones and money. They beat him with an iron bar when he refused to steal.

Now, he lives with a woman who forces him to clean the house like an unpaid servant.

Tall and beanpole thin, he wears ancient rubber sandals worn through at the heel and jeans so small they won’t zip up. His dream is to be a lawyer like his grandfather, but he has little hope of succeeding.

“The hardest problem is that when I grow up, I won’t have a future,” he said.

“Who’ll teach me?”