In June 2009 Maureen du Toit (ambassador of GIP) and Margi Kirschenmann (PR manager of GIP) traveled to South Africa to visit a project for orphans and vulnerable children in Alexandra township.

AIDS in South Africa
The socio-economic impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic has resulted in family, community and social disintegration. This is demonstrated by the escalating number of orphans and vulnerable children and of child-headed households. The extended family, already undermined by poverty, urbanization and cultural disintegration, is increasingly unable to provide such numbers of children with even the basic requirements of shelter, food, education, medical care, love and support. By 2007 2.5 million South African children were orphaned by HIV/AIDS. This number is expected to increase to 3.1 million by 2010.

Alexandra Child Care Support Centre
The Alexandra Child Care Support Centre (ACCSC) provides care to orphans and vulnerable children (OVCs) to help them lead more normal lives and attain their potential as equal citizens. Alexandra is the oldest former black settlement in Johannesburg and remains one of the most socially and economically depressed areas in South Africa. It has a population of 600 000 people living on two square miles of land.
The children are orphaned and made vulnerable by AIDS and other poverty related causes such as unemployment and illiteracy.
The center accommodates 427 OVC's. The children are receiving support which is not available for other children in the township, such as nutritional support (two meals daily), educational support (incl. career guidance) and recreational activities (sports, arts and holiday programs). Although the project has identified that the psychosocial needs of these children are enormous, little is being done to meet their needs, simply because they don't have the capacity to do so.

- to find out how GIP can help these children, and
- to make a documentary film about the ACCSC project.
We intended on focusing mainly on the needs of the OVC's but once we were there we realized that we could not isolate their problems from the problems in their environment. Not only the children need help, but also their caregivers, whether it is a single parent, a grandmother or any guardian. We knew we would encounter cases of people being isolated by stigma, but we had no idea how large this problem is.

(please read day to day report below for detailed information)

If people are ashamed to talk about their HIV status or HIV related problems, they will not likely make use of mental health care facilities, even if theses facilities where available. As long as people are afraid of being stigmatized and isolated by their friend and families, building clinics and hiring psychologist is pointless. Not only the OVC's but also the communities they live in need to be strengthened, so that you can rely on an environment in which help that is provided will be accessed. Reducing stigma is an essential condition to offer sustainable development aid to people living with HIV/AIDS in Alexandra Township. Over the next weeks GIP will work on developing a strategy paper. 

ACCSC is a pilot project, initiated by Investec Private Bank to offer holistic care and support for OVC's in Alexandra through a partnership with the local community, NPOs, schools, government agencies (education, social development, health) and some corporates. The project, which has been running since 2004, is premised on the policy framework on care and support to OVCs and the drop in center model promoted by the Department of Social Development. It is centered on a cluster of schools where it is easy, safe, secure to access and draw in services for these children. Currently, it supports 427 school going children from three primary schools, one secondary school and 40 of their siblings at the crèche. Unfortunately, the host school has limited space and it is not possible to take in more children. According to the district's department of education, this leaves out approximately 3300 other children needing similar support. The pilot can be used as a model to set up more centers for OVC's in Alexandra Township. 
Your support is more than welcome!

Day to day report

Many of the orphans and vulnerable children (OVC's) often go for days without getting meals at home. At the Alexandra Child Care Support Centre (ACCSC) the children have breakfast when they arrive and a nutritious meal is offered before they go home, around 4 pm. In most cases they will not get anything else until they go to bed.
The reason one speaks of orphans and vulnerable children, without distinguishing who is orphan and who isn't, is that the children may still have a parent, but the parent may be too sick to look after the child. In many cases the parents died of HIV/AIDS and the children are living with their grandmothers.  

We visited the crèche, which was built for 40 young siblings of the OVC's at ACCSC. Initially the project was not going to have a crèche but because many of the small siblings were left home alone, either locked up in their shack (in case of child headed households), or exposed to domestic violence and sexual abuse, the crèche was added last year. When the kids first came many did not laugh and some showed no emotion at all. Now they were all happily participating in class. 

We visited the home of a 17-year-old boy who attends the ACCSC program. He lives in a one-room shack with five people; his grandmother, his sick mother, his uncle and his nephew. There is only one bed in the shack; Michael sleeps on the floor with his legs under the bed. The whole family survives off of the grandmother's pension, which is approximately 90 euro per month.

Back at the center we spoke to mothers/guardians of four ACCSC children, all affected by HIV/AIDS. One woman's husband died of AIDS last month. She has seven children and is HIV positive. She had to move in with her sister because she could not afford to stay in her own house. When she told us this she broke out in to tears because her sister, and her sisters children treat her very badly due to her HIV-status.  
We found that many people are afraid of what others think of them, even if HIV/AIDS is not in the picture: A young girl who was raped by her half brother while visiting her father was offered no support from her family. Her father and stepmother told her that it was better to keep things quiet and not tell anybody what happened. And even when she went back home her mother told her not to seek help. It was her grandmother who stimulated her to go and see a social worker.

We attended a session at the Red Cross for adults living with problems such as HIV, poverty and substance abuse. Even in a place like this, where people come to talk about their problems, the ones with HIV did not speak openly about their status. After the session we spoke to four women who are HIV positive. One woman informed her daughters about her HIV status but she hasn't told her sons yet, although she was tested positive back in 2000. She is afraid of how they will treat her once they know.  

Many people living with HIV do not want to tell anybody because they are afraid of being isolated by their friends and their families. People who live in denial tend not to look after themselves and their condition gets worse. We were told that there is a place in Alexandra where PLHIV can get free food parcels, but not many people make use of this, because they don't want to be seen there. 

In the morning we visited a clinic where we spoke to two women working in children's homes. Abandoned children are brought in to these homes on a regular basis. One of the babies was only 1.7 kg's. He was found in a park the previous night in a basket. Another child of 18 months, who is HIV infected, was brought in two weeks earlier weighing only 4 kg's. His parents are still alive but they were not able to look after him.  
At WITS University we spoke to a psychology professor who did research on the psychological needs of children living in child-headed households. To our surprise the research was based on a one-time interview with fourteen children only. We asked what will be done with the outcome of the research and the professor said that he did not know at this stage. We hope there will be a follow up on this, so that the research was not done for nothing.  

According to the ACCSC children there are thousands of other children in Alexandra that are also orphans/vulnerable and are entitled to the same care that the center offers. To our great surprise they told us that children who do not go to the ACCSC tease the kids at the center, and laugh at them for being poor. But in reality those children are hungry and need similar care to that which is offered by the center.  
Our last interview was with three Child Minders who work at ACCSC. They are in their twenties and received basic ECD (early childhood development) training and now have very demanding jobs; besides looking after the small children at the crèche, they also function as mentors for the older children and they conduct home visits. The home visits are experienced as very difficult: the Child Minders have to go to homes of the OVC's with questionnaires every month, including questions like "How much food do the children get at home" and "Do you have enough blankets for the winter".  They often are received in a hostile way when they show up the next month without blankets. At times teenagers come to them with traumatic problems that the child minders experienced themselves in their youth. This is often very confronting, as they never had a chance to deal with their traumas.

Margi Kirschenmann, July 1st 2009