Auntie Doris

The most difficult thing to deal with in South Africa is the great disparity of wealth. There are beautiful sections of every city. The highways are good, you can drink the tap water, the airports are new, and there’s abundant shopping and a wealth of cultural opportunities. There’s also crushing poverty, ranging from merely poor to destitute people living in makeshift temporary housing that sprawls over nearby hills. It was here that we met “Auntie Doris.”
Auntie Doris is being helped by a group called Afrika Tikkun (look them up for more info). Her story is sadly a common one. After raising four children, things fell apart for her when her daughter died three years ago, likely from HIV/AIDS, leaving her with 4 grandchildren to raise. Her husband disappeared about the same time. Because of the demands of the children (the youngest was only 8 months at the time) she lost her job. She’s a proud woman, and didn’t want to ask for help, but, in her words, “I had to make myself small” and ask for food. She’s scraping by now, but her pride and strength are intact.
Her house, about the size of a classroom, is made of cinder blocks with a tin roof, but she’s lucky. She’s lived there since 1994, the year Mr. Mandela was elected president, and has several rooms, a microwave, stove, a refrigerator. She also has good neighbors. When we arrived, she was at the clinic getting her blood pressure medicine (“if you had to raise four kids, you’d need blood pressure medicine too”). A neighbor called her and sent a car to get her, since there were 4 white people standing outside of her door! Apparently we’ve given her something to gossip about for months to come.
Auntie speaks two languages, English, and Xhosa. If she appeared on Oprah she’d be a star. Her story gave us hope, but others in our group visited homes nicknamed “microwaves”, since the all metal structures heat up so quickly. Here they saw as many as 8 or 9 people crammed into tiny spaces, suffering from every problem imaginable. Toss in drug addition, crime, family violence, and HIV, and it was a tragedy. Despite this, thousands of people are moving into Cape Town and other large cities every month, living in conditions like this. Obviously this is probably the country’s greatest challenge.