Story of the Wakefield Grannies

I want to present a drama. One that continues to unfold. And as with most dramas it brings both joy and tragedy.

There is a large cast-many players on this stage-people and places I would like to introduce you to. The setting is in Alexandra, outside of Johannesburg in South Africa. Through the Internet we have been able to see something of the community-a black settlement into which it would be unsafe for a white stranger to venture. The tar-paper shacks of the slum site are being replaced by small frame houses, landscaped with areas for gardens. A new hope, although we know that the rats are still present.

Important players in our cast are Rosina Letwaba, a South African nurse, Brenda and Robert Rooney, film producers located near Wakefield, the Reverend Gisele Gilfillan, the minister in the Wakefield Pastoral Charge, and Nina Minde a child psychologist from Montreal.

Our Outreach Committee in Wakefield eagerly accepted the offer by the Rooney's to show a documentary they had filmed in Africa-called Condoms Fish and Circus Tricks. This was presented at a community function in the auditorium of the school, when we served soup and bread. The film is riveting, the soup and bread a hit, and we raised our first $1000 for B. of H.

One of the audience, a young doctor at our local hospital, mentioned to Gisele, that she may be interested in meeting his mother, Nina Minde. She and her husband Klaus, had spent part of his sabbatical in South Africa in 2002. Nina made the time to come to a service in Wakefield one Sunday, bringing pictures of her visit, and telling her story. She had, while in South Africa, offered her services at a mental health clinic for Alex AIDS Orphans. Here she met a young woman, Rose Letwaba, the head nurse of the clinic, and seemingly, the glue that held all together.

Rose, in dealing with the distressed children, met the grandmothers, who, having lost their daughters to AIDS, were now left to care for the orphaned children as best they could, with little or no support from government or family.

It occurred to Nina that perhaps these women could be support for each other, and so she and Rose organized that the grandmothers with whom she had contact should meet. They were disorganized and reluctant initially, but little by little a group did form, and inevitably found comfort and support in each other. Time was found for them to picnic together, to work at sewing projects and to develop a garden where they could grow vegetables together.

Imagine our delight when Rose was brought to a conference at the Montreal Children’s Hospital, and Nina, as promised, brought her up to Wakefield. What a time for Rose to be introduced to the Gatineau, a beautiful October weekend!

She spoke to a small but appreciative community gathering in the Church on a Saturday evening. We were able to raise substantial funding for Alex AIDS Orphans. We left wondering how else we could help.

Perhaps it was providential that I happened to meet Nina and Rose the next day at a function at the Wakefield General Store. I proposed to Rose that we form a group of "matching grannies," perhaps ten, to partner with ten of her women and the three of us Nina, Rose and I exchanged e-mail addresses.

By spontaneous combustion, ten eager women appeared within a week or two, and we met for the first time shortly afterwards.

Our initial idea was moral support, an exchange of letters. But because we realized we would inevitably end up with a bank account, we officially named ourselves Wakefield Grannies and nominated an executive, but apart from that, ‘Robert’s Rules of Order’ went out the window. After all we are a very varied but energetic bunch of enthusiastic women. For your interest we are almost an international group, having our roots in-Germany, France, England, the States, Australia, English- and French-Canada

Many have visited and worked in Africa at some stage, not all are grannies, several have backgrounds of activism, others are very shy, but what we share is our empathy, our sense of sisterhood with women in need on the other side of the world. At our first meeting together, I had, thanks to the internet, a picture of the group of Alex women (called by the Zulu name of grandmother Gogos) standing in a half circle around Rose, all singing!!! And I also had a list of their names, their addresses, and the names of the children. Each of us pulled a name from the jar, and we agreed to buy a colourful card and mail it as our introduction. Then we stood together for our own group photo as we sang "We wish you a merry Christmas."

We have had two record-breaking fund-raisers.

A recently-formed community theatrical group, The Wakefield Players, offered to put on a reading of two plays, at our now-famous Black Sheep Inn who offered their premises. The playwrights waived their fees, and two from our group offered to research African finger food for us to serve at intermission. On a Monday evening, with one of the heaviest snowfalls of the season, our fundraiser filled the premises to capacity, the finger food looked inviting (if an acquired taste), and we raised just short of $2000. We realized that we were more than a small group of women, we had an entire community behind us.

Our second fundraiser was posted as The Great Grannie Concert, held in September on our covered bridge. We approached several professional musicians with a connection to the Gatineau, who without hesitation offered their services: African dancers, a 60-voice choir, and two instrumentalists.

I had kept Rose apace with our excited preparations and so she sent me four photos with captions that I might read to the assembled audience. She asked that this fundraiser be dedicated to the HIV positive grannies in Alexandra Township within her support group. They have suffered so much loss, and now, to find that several of them are also affected is an additional burden to carry.

One of Rose’s pictures, that of a group of children carried the caption: where to from here !!! and reads "Poverty and starvation is still a major problem in this community." Children like these go to school without food. Grannies cannot afford to provide them with breakfast and lunch every day; therefore supper is the only meal they will have for the day. Some spend time sleeping in class because of hunger. If our project can afford to provide children and their grannies with lunch twice a week, we can save many children in this township. Rose is managing to distribute food supplies to fifty families, some 200 children.

A second picture has the caption: Where were you ??

By the year 2015 (in other words in 10 years time) millions of people in South Africa will be HIV positive and thousands will be dying. The question these children will be asking will be:

Where were you when AIDS destroyed our families and killed our parents?It will be a nation of children parenting children.

The last picture is of a young woman with two children, it is Busi with her 7 month-old baby and her 8 year-old sister. When Busi was 16, she and her two younger siblings lost their mother due to an AIDS-related illness-her grandmother came in to care for the family. The next year her little brother died, and the following year, her grandmother. Busi, left alone to care for her younger sister, then had a child of her own. When she didn't appear at the clinic two weeks in a row, some of the grannies went looking for her and found her in a state of extreme depression and the children starving. The mother is now hospitalized and the 8 yr old and baby are in the care of Petronella (one of our partner grannies) who was already looking after two orphaned grandchildren.

These messages were hard to read but the response was incredible. Cheques are still arriving as a result of that event-to date over $4500.

We know The Great Grannie Concert will be an annual event-the public will demand it.

The day-to-day life in Alex can break our hearts... What warms our hearts, and the hearts of our Gogos, is the personal contact. It is just over a year since we made that initial contact. In the interim many letters, cards, calendars, and photos have gone back and forth. Not all the women are literate, but they are all aware that they have partners thinking of them, praying for them, working for their cause. The money we send is used for a variety of things-recently-to buy shoes for some of the women who had never owned a pair of shoes; They are desperately poor.

But where do we go from here. We, the Wakefield Grannies are well-entrenched. Because of personal contacts, we have been responsible for groups starting on Rhode Island (Concordia Grannies), and most recently in B.C. (White Rock Grannies). And to our delight and amazement, we have been contacted by two separate pairs of 8 year-old girls who baked cookies and passed the money on to us. We are urging them to send cards or drawings to be distributed to the children at the clinic.

One way or another we will be able to touch the lives of all of the fifty families and 200 children in Rose’s care. But there are other communities where the need is just as great – communities where a dynamic Rose is not there to see that it all works. She is already being recruited by the Stephen Lewis Foundation to visit other communities and try to organize the women. There has to be a way to establish the care of and personal contact with the women carrying the horrendous burden in each of these communities.

We don't have the answers as to how this can work, but we do believe that this grass roots personal contact can do so much to improve the lives we all are concerned for. We can’t cure the AIDS or dispense drugs to ease the pain, but our contact and our funds can improve their lives and give them some hope.

I am in direct contact with Rose, I phone her from time to time-each of us excited at the opportunity to share news. We hope to ease her heavy load – afterall her work with these families is just part of her work load. She teaches nursing courses, runs a mental health clinic, and attends courses herself (in fact at present she is preparing for exams) – as I said previously – a real dynamo.

She will be interested to know that I am speaking to you today. Thank you for the opportunity.

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