Grannies in the News
2008-2010
Grannies turn over recognition card in push for action on generic drugs
by Mark Burgess
published in The Low Down to Hull & Back News, September 29, 2010
From the austere chambers of the Foreign Affairs building on Sussex Drive to the halls of the Canadian embassy in Rome, the Wakefield Grannies are being recognized for their work in combating HIV / AIDS in Africa. Far from resting on their laurels though, the group is continuing to push for wider access to generic drugs. Members of the Canadian Club of Rome, a group of ex-pat that helps Canadian network in the Italian capital, decided they wanted to help fundraise for the Grannies and flew Theatre Wakefield producers Brenda and Robert Rooney over for a gala screening of their documentary about the group.
Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon, who is the MP for Pontiac, caught wind of the event at the embassy and invited grannies Ruth Salmon and Ilse Turnsen to his office to congratulate them on their achievements and the international recognition they’ve garnered. While Salmon and Turnsen appreciated the recognition and the chance to talk to the minister about their work, they also didn’t squander the opportunity to present Cannon with a letter requesting action on the distribution of generic drugs for HIV /AIDS victims.
The two said that while all parties in the House of Commons supported fast-tracking the medicine’s delivery in 2004, action has been frustratingly slow. They’re joining a protest on parliament Hill on Sept. 29 put on by Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network in support of a private members bill that would ease distribution restrictions. “It’s the moral thing to do” Turnsen said, adding that only six per cent of infected children receive proper treatment.
She and Salmon told the minister he would be an ”incredible spokesperson” to “clear up the red tape” that prevents the drugs from being distributed. “Cannon said he would give this matter his attention and we trust that he is sincere,” Salmon said.
by Mark Burgess
published in The Low Down to Hull & Back News, September 29, 2010
From the austere chambers of the Foreign Affairs building on Sussex Drive to the halls of the Canadian embassy in Rome, the Wakefield Grannies are being recognized for their work in combating HIV / AIDS in Africa. Far from resting on their laurels though, the group is continuing to push for wider access to generic drugs. Members of the Canadian Club of Rome, a group of ex-pat that helps Canadian network in the Italian capital, decided they wanted to help fundraise for the Grannies and flew Theatre Wakefield producers Brenda and Robert Rooney over for a gala screening of their documentary about the group.
Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon, who is the MP for Pontiac, caught wind of the event at the embassy and invited grannies Ruth Salmon and Ilse Turnsen to his office to congratulate them on their achievements and the international recognition they’ve garnered. While Salmon and Turnsen appreciated the recognition and the chance to talk to the minister about their work, they also didn’t squander the opportunity to present Cannon with a letter requesting action on the distribution of generic drugs for HIV /AIDS victims.
The two said that while all parties in the House of Commons supported fast-tracking the medicine’s delivery in 2004, action has been frustratingly slow. They’re joining a protest on parliament Hill on Sept. 29 put on by Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network in support of a private members bill that would ease distribution restrictions. “It’s the moral thing to do” Turnsen said, adding that only six per cent of infected children receive proper treatment.
She and Salmon told the minister he would be an ”incredible spokesperson” to “clear up the red tape” that prevents the drugs from being distributed. “Cannon said he would give this matter his attention and we trust that he is sincere,” Salmon said.
Photo: Ilse Turnsen (left) and Ruth Salmon (right) were congratulated on their work with the Wakefield Grannies by Minister of Foreign Affairs Lawrence Cannon (centre).
Great Granny Revolution: Rose Letwaba
By Michelle Loewenstein
published in the April 2009 issue of Sandton Magazine, South Africa
No longer available from site.
By Michelle Loewenstein
published in the April 2009 issue of Sandton Magazine, South Africa
No longer available from site.
Original Grannies off to South Africa to show revolutionary doc film
By Rachel Dares
published in the The Low Down to Hull & Back News, February 10, 2008
Parenting a child is one thing. But parenting a child who’s lost both parents to HIV/AIDS is quite another.
That’s one lesson the Wakefield Grannies have learned since partnering up with the Alexandra Gogos, a group of South African grandmothers who got together to support each other in raising their AIDS-orphaned grandchildren.
A part from the grandmothers’ worries that they may not live to see their grandchildren reach adulthood, raising children in Johannesburg’s Alexandra Township is a challenge to begin with because of inadequate housing and infrastructure, said Brenda Rooney, a member of the Wakefield Grannies.
A place where a house may be a single room without electricity or running water, Alexandra is located just a few kilometers from some of South Africa’s wealthiest communities, said Rooney. Having Gogos (meaning grandmother in Zulu) start up an organization gives them more power to lobby the government for food and services, she said.
“You are talking about a society that’s still very much split (since apartheid) and this is a way to get beyond that,” said Rooney, adding that granny groups also help the Gogos realize their own self-worth.
The Wakefield Grannies support the Alexandra gogos both emotionally and financially. By writing letters and sending cards or calendars, each Gogo knows she has a friend who cares about her in Canada. They also fundraise for the gogos, who are free to use the money in whatever way they need it most. Many have bought shoes, blankets and sewing equipment, said Rooney.
After supporting the Gogos for over three years, it’s now off to Johannesburg for Norma Geggie, founder of the Wakefield Grannies, along with Brenda Rooney and Linda Gorka.
It was the city officials in Johannesburg who invited them to come and teach women about how the granny group has enriched their lives, said Rooney. The women head out March 1 and return March 12.
Those officials are aware of how many groups have benefited people in poorer areas and are hopping a workshop will lead to more granny group getting started, said Rooney.
“The whole point is for us to inspire the growth of granny groups and to illustrate how inspiring the work is,” said Rooney. “It’s about women reaching out to each other.” Thirty gogos from throughout Johannesburg and some government employees will attend the workshop March 6 and 7, where they will see The Great Granny Revolution, a documentary made by Rooney, along with her partner, Robert Rooney. filmed in Canada and south Africa, the documentary shows the bonds of friendship and compassion forged between the two granny groups throughout their three-year relationship.
The workshop will also include discussions on how and why the Wakefield Grannies and Alexandra Gogos got started, followed by lessons on the specifics of starting a granny group such as opening a bank account and fundraising. The Alexandra Gogos will talk about the parenting lessons they have learned from each other.
Founded in 2004, The Wakefield Grannies was the first granny group in Canada. Today, there are close to 200 groups across the country, said Rooney.
While in Johannesburg, Rooney’s documentary will also be screened at an invited gala, where the Canadian High Commissioner to South Africa, Ruth Archibald, and the Mayor of Johannesburg, Amos Masondo, will each give a speech.
“Every time I screen the film, I look out at the audience and they’re laughing and then I look at their faces and realize they’ve been crying,” said Rooney. “I have no doubt every time it’s screen in south Africa, it will bring change.”
The Great Granny Revolution can be purchased at Solstice in Wakefield or online at www.rooneyproductions.com.
By Rachel Dares
published in the The Low Down to Hull & Back News, February 10, 2008
Parenting a child is one thing. But parenting a child who’s lost both parents to HIV/AIDS is quite another.
That’s one lesson the Wakefield Grannies have learned since partnering up with the Alexandra Gogos, a group of South African grandmothers who got together to support each other in raising their AIDS-orphaned grandchildren.
A part from the grandmothers’ worries that they may not live to see their grandchildren reach adulthood, raising children in Johannesburg’s Alexandra Township is a challenge to begin with because of inadequate housing and infrastructure, said Brenda Rooney, a member of the Wakefield Grannies.
A place where a house may be a single room without electricity or running water, Alexandra is located just a few kilometers from some of South Africa’s wealthiest communities, said Rooney. Having Gogos (meaning grandmother in Zulu) start up an organization gives them more power to lobby the government for food and services, she said.
“You are talking about a society that’s still very much split (since apartheid) and this is a way to get beyond that,” said Rooney, adding that granny groups also help the Gogos realize their own self-worth.
The Wakefield Grannies support the Alexandra gogos both emotionally and financially. By writing letters and sending cards or calendars, each Gogo knows she has a friend who cares about her in Canada. They also fundraise for the gogos, who are free to use the money in whatever way they need it most. Many have bought shoes, blankets and sewing equipment, said Rooney.
After supporting the Gogos for over three years, it’s now off to Johannesburg for Norma Geggie, founder of the Wakefield Grannies, along with Brenda Rooney and Linda Gorka.
It was the city officials in Johannesburg who invited them to come and teach women about how the granny group has enriched their lives, said Rooney. The women head out March 1 and return March 12.
Those officials are aware of how many groups have benefited people in poorer areas and are hopping a workshop will lead to more granny group getting started, said Rooney.
“The whole point is for us to inspire the growth of granny groups and to illustrate how inspiring the work is,” said Rooney. “It’s about women reaching out to each other.” Thirty gogos from throughout Johannesburg and some government employees will attend the workshop March 6 and 7, where they will see The Great Granny Revolution, a documentary made by Rooney, along with her partner, Robert Rooney. filmed in Canada and south Africa, the documentary shows the bonds of friendship and compassion forged between the two granny groups throughout their three-year relationship.
The workshop will also include discussions on how and why the Wakefield Grannies and Alexandra Gogos got started, followed by lessons on the specifics of starting a granny group such as opening a bank account and fundraising. The Alexandra Gogos will talk about the parenting lessons they have learned from each other.
Founded in 2004, The Wakefield Grannies was the first granny group in Canada. Today, there are close to 200 groups across the country, said Rooney.
While in Johannesburg, Rooney’s documentary will also be screened at an invited gala, where the Canadian High Commissioner to South Africa, Ruth Archibald, and the Mayor of Johannesburg, Amos Masondo, will each give a speech.
“Every time I screen the film, I look out at the audience and they’re laughing and then I look at their faces and realize they’ve been crying,” said Rooney. “I have no doubt every time it’s screen in south Africa, it will bring change.”
The Great Granny Revolution can be purchased at Solstice in Wakefield or online at www.rooneyproductions.com.
2007
Granny revolution continues on multiple fronts
By Josh Clipperton
Published in The Low Down to Hull & Back News, July 4, 2007
The May Day celebration put on by the Wakefield Grannies this spring, which brought together other granny groups from across the region as well as hundreds of participants, was considered a great fundraising success. But some might be wondering, for all the baking, selling and eating done at the event: where does that money go? Well, here’s the answer. The Wakefield Grannies have been partnered for the last two years with a granny group in Alexandra, a slum of 170,000 on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa. They give money to the group to try to better the lives of the grandmothers and their families. Many of the African grannies are raising their children’s children, because of the ravages of HIV/AIDS. On top of this tragedy, many of children themselves are afflicted with the disease. The money the group raises at events – like the one held in May at the Wakefield Recreation Centre – goes into an account called the Alex Aids Orphans Account. Norma Geggie of the Wakefield Grannies says the group doesn’t dictate where the money is spent, but is definitely made aware. One of the original African grannies is Rose Letwaba, who worked at the Eastbank Clinic AIDS centre in Alexandra. The union between the Wakefielders and their African counterparts came out of chance meeting with Letwaba in Canada. Her sister Diana now liaises with the Wakefield Grannies by e-mail. “This year they’ve bought winter blankets and track suits for the HIV positive kids because they’re very susceptible (to the cold) because they’ve lost their immune systems,” says Geggie. She says another portion of the money raised in May is going towards a getaway for some teens in Alexandra who have been forced to raise their younger siblings because of the disease. “They want to take them on an outing because they’re the heads of households,” says Geggie. “They’re planning on taking them away so they can have a break from life they’ve never really had.” Issues to be discussed include alcohol and drug abuse, teen pregnancy, safe sex, HIV/AIDS, their own personal circumstance and peer pressures. Sometimes the fight against HIV/AIDS in Africa seems hopeless, but Geggie says the Wakefield Grannies, and everyone who donates, is making a difference. “It would seem hopeless if not for the fact that we know that we’re helping to improve the lives of those families,” says Geggie. Another spoke in the wheel of the Wakefield Grannies movement is the film “The Great Granny Revolution” by Rooney Productions. The work premiered at the May Day celebration, and following some subtle changes after the Wakefield show, Brenda Rooney packed her bag and took the movie west. “It’s been going really well,” says husband Bob Rooney, who co-produced the film. “She’s been getting swarmed by women of all ages afterwards, and word of mouth is really getting around.” Rooney has visited Vancouver, Victoria, Edmonton and Winnipeg, as well as some smaller towns. The film - shot in both Canada and South Africa - shows how the Wakefield women responded to the AIDS pandemic in South Africa in their own way by reaching out to their African counterparts with both moral and financial support. Bob Rooney says there are plans for a fall tour in Ontario as well as another Wakefield viewing, but nothing has been finalized. “We’ll keep you posted,” he says.
By Josh Clipperton
Published in The Low Down to Hull & Back News, July 4, 2007
The May Day celebration put on by the Wakefield Grannies this spring, which brought together other granny groups from across the region as well as hundreds of participants, was considered a great fundraising success. But some might be wondering, for all the baking, selling and eating done at the event: where does that money go? Well, here’s the answer. The Wakefield Grannies have been partnered for the last two years with a granny group in Alexandra, a slum of 170,000 on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa. They give money to the group to try to better the lives of the grandmothers and their families. Many of the African grannies are raising their children’s children, because of the ravages of HIV/AIDS. On top of this tragedy, many of children themselves are afflicted with the disease. The money the group raises at events – like the one held in May at the Wakefield Recreation Centre – goes into an account called the Alex Aids Orphans Account. Norma Geggie of the Wakefield Grannies says the group doesn’t dictate where the money is spent, but is definitely made aware. One of the original African grannies is Rose Letwaba, who worked at the Eastbank Clinic AIDS centre in Alexandra. The union between the Wakefielders and their African counterparts came out of chance meeting with Letwaba in Canada. Her sister Diana now liaises with the Wakefield Grannies by e-mail. “This year they’ve bought winter blankets and track suits for the HIV positive kids because they’re very susceptible (to the cold) because they’ve lost their immune systems,” says Geggie. She says another portion of the money raised in May is going towards a getaway for some teens in Alexandra who have been forced to raise their younger siblings because of the disease. “They want to take them on an outing because they’re the heads of households,” says Geggie. “They’re planning on taking them away so they can have a break from life they’ve never really had.” Issues to be discussed include alcohol and drug abuse, teen pregnancy, safe sex, HIV/AIDS, their own personal circumstance and peer pressures. Sometimes the fight against HIV/AIDS in Africa seems hopeless, but Geggie says the Wakefield Grannies, and everyone who donates, is making a difference. “It would seem hopeless if not for the fact that we know that we’re helping to improve the lives of those families,” says Geggie. Another spoke in the wheel of the Wakefield Grannies movement is the film “The Great Granny Revolution” by Rooney Productions. The work premiered at the May Day celebration, and following some subtle changes after the Wakefield show, Brenda Rooney packed her bag and took the movie west. “It’s been going really well,” says husband Bob Rooney, who co-produced the film. “She’s been getting swarmed by women of all ages afterwards, and word of mouth is really getting around.” Rooney has visited Vancouver, Victoria, Edmonton and Winnipeg, as well as some smaller towns. The film - shot in both Canada and South Africa - shows how the Wakefield women responded to the AIDS pandemic in South Africa in their own way by reaching out to their African counterparts with both moral and financial support. Bob Rooney says there are plans for a fall tour in Ontario as well as another Wakefield viewing, but nothing has been finalized. “We’ll keep you posted,” he says.
A few good grannies: The Great Granny Revolution comes to Winnipeg
By JACQUELINE HOGUE STAFF - Published in the Manitoban
“Never forget that you’re talking about human beings.” - Angélique Kidjo
On Sunday, April 22, Stephen Lewis, the United Nations secretary general’s special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, spoke at Crocus Plains High School in Brandon. Lewis spoke about Canadian and South African grandmothers getting together and supporting each other. He also called his audience to action to counter Africa’s HIV/AIDS epidemic. I attended his lecture not knowing exactly what to expect, but more than a month later his words and dreams were still echoing in my ears. I have never been hugely interested in politics and global affairs, but Lewis’ words sparked something in me that evening.
When I read in a local bulletin that Mennonite Central Committee Manitoba was hosting screenings of The Great Granny Revolution, a documentary by Robert and Brenda Rooney, I realized this film was about the same group of women that Stephen Lewis had alluded to in his April 22 speech.
Equipped with my new can-do attitude, I decided the $10 admission fee would be worth my while, so I got in my car and headed to the Park Theatre to learn more about these women. At the theatre I realized I was one of about five people under the age of 25 in attendance. At showtime the ticket-taker informed me that “about 110 tickets [had] been sold… 109 to be exact.” The grandmothers in Winnipeg were supporting this granny revolution.
As a result of the AIDS pandemic in Africa many children have been left parentless. The resulting unique phenomenon involves many South African grandmothers having to care for their orphaned grandchildren. When grandmothers in Canada started learning about the difficulties of grandmothers in South Africa, they knew they had to support their South African counterparts.
The film opens in Wakefield, Quebec. Norma Geggie, now 81, heads up a group of 12 Wakefield women who decided to support grandmothers in Alexandra, South Africa. Rose Letwaba, who met Geggie in Wakefield, works as a nurse in the health clinic in Alexandra Township on the outer edge of Johannesburg. Nina Minde, a child psychologist who volunteered to run a support group with Letwaba, spoke in Wakefield about the women in South Africa “who had lost their daughters to AIDS and were now left to look after their orphan grandchildren.” Geggie was inspired to help these women.
One of the only men I recall seeing in The Great Granny Revolution is Stephen Lewis, who has referred to himself as a feminist. But during the question-and-answer period Rooney said that after showing raw footage of this film in Wakefield she “was almost attacked in the kitchen” with the question, “Where are all the men?” Rooney explained that “there are very few men around in Alex… I do not know if you understand that AIDS in women in Africa is a much more virulent disease because of our, as they say, physical set-up; we’re more exposed…. So the women die sooner, even though it may be the men who are infecting them. And often, when the men understand that their wives are infected, they just leave. We’re talking about a society that has come through years of apartheid damage; where families… were systematically destroyed.”
Rooney said she thinks “it’s a really important thing that there’s room in this movement for everyone; young, old, men and women.” Paradoxically, these senior citizens are sources of inspiration to young people, giving them the energy and drive to work for a better world. Angélique Kidjo, a successful African singer, says in The Great Granny Revolution, “I am so frustrated and tired of seeing only bad image about my continent. They actually are doing what every grandparent should be doing; taking care of their grandchildren, and the sad part is that they have to bury their own kids.” Kidjo goes on, “What I always say to people when people come to me and ask me: ‘What can we do to help in Africa?’ I say: ‘Never forget that you’re talking about human beings.’”
So, in a world of iTunes, iPods, and iPhones, are we collectively forgetting about or choosing to ignore the “we?” We the people have the power to connect. If grey-haired old women believe they can impact a change in the world then why can’t our generation? Also, as a woman, what Kidjo says inspires me: “I believe that the women of this planet, if they get together, this world would change in a heartbeat because we have the power of changing, we carry babies, we give life to boys and girls and we know how hard it is to have kids and to raise a family and we are going to make it happen!”
By JACQUELINE HOGUE STAFF - Published in the Manitoban
“Never forget that you’re talking about human beings.” - Angélique Kidjo
On Sunday, April 22, Stephen Lewis, the United Nations secretary general’s special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, spoke at Crocus Plains High School in Brandon. Lewis spoke about Canadian and South African grandmothers getting together and supporting each other. He also called his audience to action to counter Africa’s HIV/AIDS epidemic. I attended his lecture not knowing exactly what to expect, but more than a month later his words and dreams were still echoing in my ears. I have never been hugely interested in politics and global affairs, but Lewis’ words sparked something in me that evening.
When I read in a local bulletin that Mennonite Central Committee Manitoba was hosting screenings of The Great Granny Revolution, a documentary by Robert and Brenda Rooney, I realized this film was about the same group of women that Stephen Lewis had alluded to in his April 22 speech.
Equipped with my new can-do attitude, I decided the $10 admission fee would be worth my while, so I got in my car and headed to the Park Theatre to learn more about these women. At the theatre I realized I was one of about five people under the age of 25 in attendance. At showtime the ticket-taker informed me that “about 110 tickets [had] been sold… 109 to be exact.” The grandmothers in Winnipeg were supporting this granny revolution.
As a result of the AIDS pandemic in Africa many children have been left parentless. The resulting unique phenomenon involves many South African grandmothers having to care for their orphaned grandchildren. When grandmothers in Canada started learning about the difficulties of grandmothers in South Africa, they knew they had to support their South African counterparts.
The film opens in Wakefield, Quebec. Norma Geggie, now 81, heads up a group of 12 Wakefield women who decided to support grandmothers in Alexandra, South Africa. Rose Letwaba, who met Geggie in Wakefield, works as a nurse in the health clinic in Alexandra Township on the outer edge of Johannesburg. Nina Minde, a child psychologist who volunteered to run a support group with Letwaba, spoke in Wakefield about the women in South Africa “who had lost their daughters to AIDS and were now left to look after their orphan grandchildren.” Geggie was inspired to help these women.
One of the only men I recall seeing in The Great Granny Revolution is Stephen Lewis, who has referred to himself as a feminist. But during the question-and-answer period Rooney said that after showing raw footage of this film in Wakefield she “was almost attacked in the kitchen” with the question, “Where are all the men?” Rooney explained that “there are very few men around in Alex… I do not know if you understand that AIDS in women in Africa is a much more virulent disease because of our, as they say, physical set-up; we’re more exposed…. So the women die sooner, even though it may be the men who are infecting them. And often, when the men understand that their wives are infected, they just leave. We’re talking about a society that has come through years of apartheid damage; where families… were systematically destroyed.”
Rooney said she thinks “it’s a really important thing that there’s room in this movement for everyone; young, old, men and women.” Paradoxically, these senior citizens are sources of inspiration to young people, giving them the energy and drive to work for a better world. Angélique Kidjo, a successful African singer, says in The Great Granny Revolution, “I am so frustrated and tired of seeing only bad image about my continent. They actually are doing what every grandparent should be doing; taking care of their grandchildren, and the sad part is that they have to bury their own kids.” Kidjo goes on, “What I always say to people when people come to me and ask me: ‘What can we do to help in Africa?’ I say: ‘Never forget that you’re talking about human beings.’”
So, in a world of iTunes, iPods, and iPhones, are we collectively forgetting about or choosing to ignore the “we?” We the people have the power to connect. If grey-haired old women believe they can impact a change in the world then why can’t our generation? Also, as a woman, what Kidjo says inspires me: “I believe that the women of this planet, if they get together, this world would change in a heartbeat because we have the power of changing, we carry babies, we give life to boys and girls and we know how hard it is to have kids and to raise a family and we are going to make it happen!”
Wakefield May Day fest draws a thousand
By Josh Clipperton
published in the The Low Down to Hull & Back News, May 9, 2007
Wakefield’s sun drenched May Day celebration brought together about 1,000 of the usual suspects and a few new ones. The Wakefield Grannies - along with other granny organisations from both sides of the Ottawa river- gathered at the recreation centre fair grounds May 5 to raise money for charity and usher in the re-birth of spring.
“it’s a day to celebrate our solidarity as a group” says Granny Brenda Rooney. “The idea is a group of women coming together to achieve so much and a community coming together to achieve so much.”
The Wakefield Grannies group is dedicated to raising money and awareness about the plight of their fellow grandmothers in Africa. Many children there are left without parents because HIV/AIDS. as a result, countless grandmothers are forced to raise orphaned children.
Twelve other granny groups joined Wakefield’s incarnation, along with local businesses and volunteers, to raise more than $10,000 for charity through a garage sale, food stands and the peddling arts and crafts.
Most of the granny groups are affiliated with the Stephen Lewis Foundation, which works to ease the ravages of AIDS at the grassroots level.
A group of irreverent and unloving ladies 60 and older, managed to raise a whopping $4,746 through a garage sale they organized to support the Granny cause.
PHILANTHROPIST KIDS
Two of the youngest volunteers involved in the May Day celebration were Emma Thompson of Chelsea and Marley Kennelly from Masham. The 10-year-olds sold cookies and donated the profits to the Wakefield Grannies.
Thompson says they don’t just raise money by basking. “Instead of getting presents for our birthdays, we ask for money so we can send it away.”
Organizers estimate well over 1,000 people attended the May Day celebration.
The event also marked the premiere of Rooney’s documentary The Great Granny Revolution, a film she made with her husband that continues the Grannies cause helping African Grandmothers.
By Josh Clipperton
published in the The Low Down to Hull & Back News, May 9, 2007
Wakefield’s sun drenched May Day celebration brought together about 1,000 of the usual suspects and a few new ones. The Wakefield Grannies - along with other granny organisations from both sides of the Ottawa river- gathered at the recreation centre fair grounds May 5 to raise money for charity and usher in the re-birth of spring.
“it’s a day to celebrate our solidarity as a group” says Granny Brenda Rooney. “The idea is a group of women coming together to achieve so much and a community coming together to achieve so much.”
The Wakefield Grannies group is dedicated to raising money and awareness about the plight of their fellow grandmothers in Africa. Many children there are left without parents because HIV/AIDS. as a result, countless grandmothers are forced to raise orphaned children.
Twelve other granny groups joined Wakefield’s incarnation, along with local businesses and volunteers, to raise more than $10,000 for charity through a garage sale, food stands and the peddling arts and crafts.
Most of the granny groups are affiliated with the Stephen Lewis Foundation, which works to ease the ravages of AIDS at the grassroots level.
A group of irreverent and unloving ladies 60 and older, managed to raise a whopping $4,746 through a garage sale they organized to support the Granny cause.
PHILANTHROPIST KIDS
Two of the youngest volunteers involved in the May Day celebration were Emma Thompson of Chelsea and Marley Kennelly from Masham. The 10-year-olds sold cookies and donated the profits to the Wakefield Grannies.
Thompson says they don’t just raise money by basking. “Instead of getting presents for our birthdays, we ask for money so we can send it away.”
Organizers estimate well over 1,000 people attended the May Day celebration.
The event also marked the premiere of Rooney’s documentary The Great Granny Revolution, a film she made with her husband that continues the Grannies cause helping African Grandmothers.
RAWQ awards go to W’field Grannies and keeper of Gatineau Hills history
By Josh Clipperton
published in the The Low Down to Hull & Back News , May 9, 2007
Two Gatineau Hills residents and a famous bevy of ladies are to be celebrated by the Regional Association of West Quebecers at the group’s awards banquet June 1. But even though they are to be honoured, two had no idea they’d been nominated until they were notified that they were winners. Chelsea’s Jay Atherton, Cantley’s Beryl Kerrison and the Wakefield Grannies will be honoured at the event for their volunteer work. Atherton says he’s not sure who nominated him, but he has an idea. Regardless, he’s appreciative. “I was very pleased. Surprised, but pleased,” says Atherton, who won the award for community service in arts and culture. “It’s a very good association. It’s doing excellent work, opening up the community recognizing work done.”
The association’s outstanding achievement award will go to the Wakefield Grannies. The group is being recognized for their work in raising awareness about the HIV/AIDS pandemics that ravage the families of fellow grandmothers in Africa. The fourth annual awards banquet for the Regional Association of West Quebecers, a federally-funded organization promoting the anglophone community based in Aylmer, takes place June 1 at la Maison du Citoyen in Hull.
By Josh Clipperton
published in the The Low Down to Hull & Back News , May 9, 2007
Two Gatineau Hills residents and a famous bevy of ladies are to be celebrated by the Regional Association of West Quebecers at the group’s awards banquet June 1. But even though they are to be honoured, two had no idea they’d been nominated until they were notified that they were winners. Chelsea’s Jay Atherton, Cantley’s Beryl Kerrison and the Wakefield Grannies will be honoured at the event for their volunteer work. Atherton says he’s not sure who nominated him, but he has an idea. Regardless, he’s appreciative. “I was very pleased. Surprised, but pleased,” says Atherton, who won the award for community service in arts and culture. “It’s a very good association. It’s doing excellent work, opening up the community recognizing work done.”
The association’s outstanding achievement award will go to the Wakefield Grannies. The group is being recognized for their work in raising awareness about the HIV/AIDS pandemics that ravage the families of fellow grandmothers in Africa. The fourth annual awards banquet for the Regional Association of West Quebecers, a federally-funded organization promoting the anglophone community based in Aylmer, takes place June 1 at la Maison du Citoyen in Hull.
When Wakefield met South Africa
By Don Butler
published in the Ottawa Citizen, May 5, 2007
There’s a scene near the end of The Great Granny Revolution, Robert and Brenda Rooney’s new documentary about the Wakefield Grannies and the movement they helped inspire, that speaks to the special qualities of the eclectic Gatineau Hills community north of Ottawa.
In the scene, Rose Letwaba, the South African nurse whose visit to Wakefield three years ago started everything, is speaking to a full house at the village’s United Church. "If everyone was like the people of Wakefield," she tells the audience, with heartfelt sincerity, "the world would be a better place to live in."
As founder of the Alex Gogos, a group of African grandmothers who are raising AIDS orphans in the Johannesburg slum of Alexandra Township, Ms. Letwaba knows better than most how exceptional the Wakefield Grannies — and the community that has so magnificently supported them — really are.
Now, thanks to the 80-minute documentary by the Rooneys, who live about 20 kilometres north of Wakefield in Lac-des-Loups, the rest of the world can share in the discovery. The film, nearly three years in the making, premieres with two screenings today at a special May Day celebration in Wakefield hosted by the village’s now-famous granny group.
"I think it’s an inspiring film in some ways, and it’s a good news story," says Robert Rooney. His wife Brenda, who narrates the film and is one of its central characters, calls it endearing. "The thing is, the Wakefield Grannies are rather amusing. There are so many funny moments."
In many ways, the film is a labour of love. Brenda Rooney was one of the first people Norma Geggie called when she decided to form the Wakefield Grannies in 2004 after hearing Ms. Letwaba describe the plight of impoverished African grandmothers forced to shoulder the burden of raising millions of children orphaned by HIV/AIDS.
Like nearly a dozen other women approached by Ms. Geggie, an 82-year-old dynamo, Ms. Rooney swiftly agreed and, almost overnight, the Wakefield Grannies were born. They paired up with the Alex Gogos, and have since raised thousands of dollars to support them.
Last spring, the Stephen Lewis Foundation picked up the idea, launching its Grandmother to Grandmother campaign. Today, there are more than 150 grandmother groups in Canada and the United States, including a dozen in the Ottawa area alone. Collectively, they have raised $1 million for African grandmothers.
Unlike the Wakefield group, most granny groups are not paired directly with African grandmothers. Rather, the Stephen Lewis Foundation funnels the money they raise to those in greatest need. But the Wakefield Grannies were the trailblazers, the first to recognize the immense privation of African grandmothers and take action.
Right from their first meeting, Robert Rooney was there with his camera. A former theatre director who has also worked in television, he immediately recognized that the Wakefield Grannies were in the vanguard of a nascent movement of late-in-life activism by women with education and skills far beyond those of previous generations.
Whenever the Grannies met, Mr. Rooney was there to record their deliberations. It took months for the women, some shy and self-conscious, to get used to the camera. But eventually they learned to ignore it.
Last spring, the Rooneys travelled to South Africa to film the Alex Gogos in their humble homes. Their stories, both painful and inspiring, provide some of the film’s most riveting moments. When several Wakefield Grannies attended a gathering of Canadian and African grandmothers last summer in Toronto, that too became part of the story. And when Ms. Letwaba and three African grandmothers visited Wakefield last August, the Rooneys were able to bring the tale full circle.
The result, distilled from more than 60 hours of film, is a unique record of the evolution of an initially modest undertaking that has blossomed into something much more important. Though the project started out as a film about AIDS like their previous documentary, Condoms, Fish and Circus Tricks, the Rooneys say it changed form as it progressed.
"I found out I wasn’t making a film about AIDS," Mr. Rooney says. "I was making a film about women. It was about the relationship of these two groups of women and how they influence each other, how they spur each other on, how they change each other’s lives." And, adds Brenda Rooney, it’s also a story about Wakefield, a place with a vibrant community spirit and more than its share of writers, painters, artists and people who have worked in places like Africa.
Wakefield was critical to the Grannies’ success, she says. "It was the right time in history with women at this point, and it was the right place. It somehow caught magic." The film reflects its central role, her husband says. "Mostly it’s a celebration of the life of this village."
The village’s residents comprise the supporting cast. "So many people are going to see themselves in it," says Mr. Rooney. "It’s a cast of thousands."
The version of The Great Granny Revolution that will screen today is not quite complete. Sound mastering still must be done, a step the Rooneys chose to put off until the community has a chance to provide feedback. Based on that, changes are still possible.
Mr. Rooney, haggard after 36 hours without sleep in the final editing push, says he’s too tired to be nervous about the community’s reaction, though he adds: "I think they’re going to love it."
Even so, he concedes that it’s a challenge to make a film about your own community, "because you’re going to have to live in that community."
It can also be problematic to make a documentary in which you are a key participant, says Brenda Rooney.
"There are conflicts," she acknowledges. "There were occasions when Robert would rather see us deal with something in a more dramatic way perhaps than I wanted to.
"I had an inclination to make us always look good. I didn’t want our terrible warts showing." In the end, though, "all the warts made the film," she says.
One of the hardest tasks was editing the Grannies’ discussions, Mr. Rooney says, "They never shut up. They’re all talking at once, so it’s very hard to edit them. That has been a nightmare."
Since forming in the fall of 2004, the women in the Grannies have grown incredibly, says Mr. Rooney.
"When they started, a lot of them had very little interest in any kind of global movement. They were happy just to be connected to this little group of gogos in Alexandra. But they were sort of thrust into a leadership role in this movement, and they’ve taken it on."
In particular, Norma Geggie has risen to the challenge, he says, proselytizing to many audiences. "She’s responsible for probably 15 groups that have formed just herself."
If anything, Mr. Rooney is even more impressed by the journey taken by the African grandmothers. When Rose Letwaba formed the Alex Gogos, he says, "they didn’t know what the hell was going on with their lives. They had no idea what was killing their children. They didn’t know anything about AIDS.
"Now they are like spokesmen for the issue. They’re able to take that on because they’ve got the confidence of knowing there are women in First World countries who are their friends."
Mr. Rooney’s favourite scene shows one of the African grandmothers, raising four orphans in her one-room home, who keeps the kids’ toothbrush under lock and key because to her, it is such a valuable item. "That tells you about their relative wealth."
Later this month, Brenda Rooney will embark for Western Canada for a series of one-off theatrical screenings of the film. So far, 13 have been confirmed, in places like Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, and Vernon and Nelson, B.C. This fall, she’ll do a similar tour through southern Ontario. Showings are set in London, Waterloo, Guelph and the Hamilton area. A television showing is also a possibility — based on the film’s website trailer, two broadcasters have expressed interest.
And, it hardly needs saying, there’ll be a screening for the African grandmothers too. If Brenda Rooney has her way, before the year is out the film will be screened at a fundraising event in South Africa, with the Alex Gogos and at least some of the Wakefield Grannies in attendance.
"Then," she says delightedly, "we’ll just have a party."
The Great Granny Revolution will be shown today at the United Church in Wakefield at 5 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Admission is $10.
By Don Butler
published in the Ottawa Citizen, May 5, 2007
There’s a scene near the end of The Great Granny Revolution, Robert and Brenda Rooney’s new documentary about the Wakefield Grannies and the movement they helped inspire, that speaks to the special qualities of the eclectic Gatineau Hills community north of Ottawa.
In the scene, Rose Letwaba, the South African nurse whose visit to Wakefield three years ago started everything, is speaking to a full house at the village’s United Church. "If everyone was like the people of Wakefield," she tells the audience, with heartfelt sincerity, "the world would be a better place to live in."
As founder of the Alex Gogos, a group of African grandmothers who are raising AIDS orphans in the Johannesburg slum of Alexandra Township, Ms. Letwaba knows better than most how exceptional the Wakefield Grannies — and the community that has so magnificently supported them — really are.
Now, thanks to the 80-minute documentary by the Rooneys, who live about 20 kilometres north of Wakefield in Lac-des-Loups, the rest of the world can share in the discovery. The film, nearly three years in the making, premieres with two screenings today at a special May Day celebration in Wakefield hosted by the village’s now-famous granny group.
"I think it’s an inspiring film in some ways, and it’s a good news story," says Robert Rooney. His wife Brenda, who narrates the film and is one of its central characters, calls it endearing. "The thing is, the Wakefield Grannies are rather amusing. There are so many funny moments."
In many ways, the film is a labour of love. Brenda Rooney was one of the first people Norma Geggie called when she decided to form the Wakefield Grannies in 2004 after hearing Ms. Letwaba describe the plight of impoverished African grandmothers forced to shoulder the burden of raising millions of children orphaned by HIV/AIDS.
Like nearly a dozen other women approached by Ms. Geggie, an 82-year-old dynamo, Ms. Rooney swiftly agreed and, almost overnight, the Wakefield Grannies were born. They paired up with the Alex Gogos, and have since raised thousands of dollars to support them.
Last spring, the Stephen Lewis Foundation picked up the idea, launching its Grandmother to Grandmother campaign. Today, there are more than 150 grandmother groups in Canada and the United States, including a dozen in the Ottawa area alone. Collectively, they have raised $1 million for African grandmothers.
Unlike the Wakefield group, most granny groups are not paired directly with African grandmothers. Rather, the Stephen Lewis Foundation funnels the money they raise to those in greatest need. But the Wakefield Grannies were the trailblazers, the first to recognize the immense privation of African grandmothers and take action.
Right from their first meeting, Robert Rooney was there with his camera. A former theatre director who has also worked in television, he immediately recognized that the Wakefield Grannies were in the vanguard of a nascent movement of late-in-life activism by women with education and skills far beyond those of previous generations.
Whenever the Grannies met, Mr. Rooney was there to record their deliberations. It took months for the women, some shy and self-conscious, to get used to the camera. But eventually they learned to ignore it.
Last spring, the Rooneys travelled to South Africa to film the Alex Gogos in their humble homes. Their stories, both painful and inspiring, provide some of the film’s most riveting moments. When several Wakefield Grannies attended a gathering of Canadian and African grandmothers last summer in Toronto, that too became part of the story. And when Ms. Letwaba and three African grandmothers visited Wakefield last August, the Rooneys were able to bring the tale full circle.
The result, distilled from more than 60 hours of film, is a unique record of the evolution of an initially modest undertaking that has blossomed into something much more important. Though the project started out as a film about AIDS like their previous documentary, Condoms, Fish and Circus Tricks, the Rooneys say it changed form as it progressed.
"I found out I wasn’t making a film about AIDS," Mr. Rooney says. "I was making a film about women. It was about the relationship of these two groups of women and how they influence each other, how they spur each other on, how they change each other’s lives." And, adds Brenda Rooney, it’s also a story about Wakefield, a place with a vibrant community spirit and more than its share of writers, painters, artists and people who have worked in places like Africa.
Wakefield was critical to the Grannies’ success, she says. "It was the right time in history with women at this point, and it was the right place. It somehow caught magic." The film reflects its central role, her husband says. "Mostly it’s a celebration of the life of this village."
The village’s residents comprise the supporting cast. "So many people are going to see themselves in it," says Mr. Rooney. "It’s a cast of thousands."
The version of The Great Granny Revolution that will screen today is not quite complete. Sound mastering still must be done, a step the Rooneys chose to put off until the community has a chance to provide feedback. Based on that, changes are still possible.
Mr. Rooney, haggard after 36 hours without sleep in the final editing push, says he’s too tired to be nervous about the community’s reaction, though he adds: "I think they’re going to love it."
Even so, he concedes that it’s a challenge to make a film about your own community, "because you’re going to have to live in that community."
It can also be problematic to make a documentary in which you are a key participant, says Brenda Rooney.
"There are conflicts," she acknowledges. "There were occasions when Robert would rather see us deal with something in a more dramatic way perhaps than I wanted to.
"I had an inclination to make us always look good. I didn’t want our terrible warts showing." In the end, though, "all the warts made the film," she says.
One of the hardest tasks was editing the Grannies’ discussions, Mr. Rooney says, "They never shut up. They’re all talking at once, so it’s very hard to edit them. That has been a nightmare."
Since forming in the fall of 2004, the women in the Grannies have grown incredibly, says Mr. Rooney.
"When they started, a lot of them had very little interest in any kind of global movement. They were happy just to be connected to this little group of gogos in Alexandra. But they were sort of thrust into a leadership role in this movement, and they’ve taken it on."
In particular, Norma Geggie has risen to the challenge, he says, proselytizing to many audiences. "She’s responsible for probably 15 groups that have formed just herself."
If anything, Mr. Rooney is even more impressed by the journey taken by the African grandmothers. When Rose Letwaba formed the Alex Gogos, he says, "they didn’t know what the hell was going on with their lives. They had no idea what was killing their children. They didn’t know anything about AIDS.
"Now they are like spokesmen for the issue. They’re able to take that on because they’ve got the confidence of knowing there are women in First World countries who are their friends."
Mr. Rooney’s favourite scene shows one of the African grandmothers, raising four orphans in her one-room home, who keeps the kids’ toothbrush under lock and key because to her, it is such a valuable item. "That tells you about their relative wealth."
Later this month, Brenda Rooney will embark for Western Canada for a series of one-off theatrical screenings of the film. So far, 13 have been confirmed, in places like Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, and Vernon and Nelson, B.C. This fall, she’ll do a similar tour through southern Ontario. Showings are set in London, Waterloo, Guelph and the Hamilton area. A television showing is also a possibility — based on the film’s website trailer, two broadcasters have expressed interest.
And, it hardly needs saying, there’ll be a screening for the African grandmothers too. If Brenda Rooney has her way, before the year is out the film will be screened at a fundraising event in South Africa, with the Alex Gogos and at least some of the Wakefield Grannies in attendance.
"Then," she says delightedly, "we’ll just have a party."
The Great Granny Revolution will be shown today at the United Church in Wakefield at 5 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Admission is $10.
Wakefield Women Story
by Pamela Oddy
published in the Australian magazine Your Life, Autumn 2007
Quebec’s Wakefield Grannies have been the catalyst for a growing movement to support Africa ‘unsung heroes’ − the woman raising their grandchildren orphaned by AIDS.
The more I read about her (and there’s plenty on the Internet) the more I regret not meeting Norma Geggie when she visited Australia in April 2006. She wasn’t here having lived in Canada since the mid-1950, she came simply to spend time with family. Among those she caught up with on this occasion was her niece and my best friend, who told me about Norma’s passion, the Wakefield Grannies.
This group of grandmothers of all ages first came together in Quebec in 2004, after Rose Letwaba spoke at Wakefield United Church. The head nurse in a children’s psychiatric clinic in poverty-stricken Alexandra Township (‘Alex’) near Johannesburg. Rose told of the terrible toll being exacted by AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, of the (now) 13 millions children who have been orphaned by the death of their parents from AIDS, of the 50 per cent of these children who now live in households headed by grandparents, and of the grandmothers − gogos in Zulu − who care for nine out of 10 of these children.
Not surprisingly, their return to the parenting role has produced high levels of anguish and stress among the gogos. Many fear they will not live long enough to care for the children into adulthood and there is always the spectre of more family members being struck down by AIDS. The children themselves have been traumatized by witnessing the slow death of their parents.
Rose also spoke she and visiting Canadian Nina Minde had formed in Alex to support 40 of these valiant grandmothers, and it was this that inspired Norma Geggie’s brainwave. “I asked Rose, ‘what if a group of women in Wakefield were to partner with these women in Alex?’ And both Rose and Nina agreed this would be a marvelous idea” Norma explained to Canadian newspaper The Ottawa Citizen.
The results have been remarkable. First, each of the Wakefield Grannies drew from a jar the name of a partner gogo; each writes regularly to this partner. The next task was to set about raising money: Norma now sends regular sums to Rose Letwaba to distribute in line with her knowledge of local needs. And then news of Norma and her 10 fellow-Wakefield Grannies began to spread.
Soon, more grannies’ groups started popping up in Canada, at first slowly then faster following the launch of a Grandmothers to Grandmothers campaign in March 2006 by the Stephen Lewis Foundation, which supports grass-roots AIDS projects in Africa. In August 2006, in advance of the XVI International AIDS Conference held in Toronto, the Foundation brought together 200 Canadian and 100 sub-Saharan African women for a two-day ‘Grandmothers’ Gathering’ to consolidate and celebrate the movement. It succeeded magnificently.
There are now more than 140 grandmothers’ groups across Canada and the movement is spreading internationally: to date it has reached the US, New Zealand and Australia. There is currently one group in Australia − leaving plenty of room for more.
Many of the news items about the Wakefield Grannies and the movement they have set in motion quote the words of Gloria Steinem, “One day an army of grey-haired women may quietly take over the earth”. Not all the Wakefield Grannies are grey-haired (although my friend and the newspapers tell me that Norma Geggie is), indeed, not all of them are grandmothers, but there is no doubt the world would benefit from the ministrations of more such generous, compassionate and determined women.
As for meeting Norma Geggie: I’ll clear my diary the next time I hear she’s on her way.
by Pamela Oddy
published in the Australian magazine Your Life, Autumn 2007
Quebec’s Wakefield Grannies have been the catalyst for a growing movement to support Africa ‘unsung heroes’ − the woman raising their grandchildren orphaned by AIDS.
The more I read about her (and there’s plenty on the Internet) the more I regret not meeting Norma Geggie when she visited Australia in April 2006. She wasn’t here having lived in Canada since the mid-1950, she came simply to spend time with family. Among those she caught up with on this occasion was her niece and my best friend, who told me about Norma’s passion, the Wakefield Grannies.
This group of grandmothers of all ages first came together in Quebec in 2004, after Rose Letwaba spoke at Wakefield United Church. The head nurse in a children’s psychiatric clinic in poverty-stricken Alexandra Township (‘Alex’) near Johannesburg. Rose told of the terrible toll being exacted by AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, of the (now) 13 millions children who have been orphaned by the death of their parents from AIDS, of the 50 per cent of these children who now live in households headed by grandparents, and of the grandmothers − gogos in Zulu − who care for nine out of 10 of these children.
Not surprisingly, their return to the parenting role has produced high levels of anguish and stress among the gogos. Many fear they will not live long enough to care for the children into adulthood and there is always the spectre of more family members being struck down by AIDS. The children themselves have been traumatized by witnessing the slow death of their parents.
Rose also spoke she and visiting Canadian Nina Minde had formed in Alex to support 40 of these valiant grandmothers, and it was this that inspired Norma Geggie’s brainwave. “I asked Rose, ‘what if a group of women in Wakefield were to partner with these women in Alex?’ And both Rose and Nina agreed this would be a marvelous idea” Norma explained to Canadian newspaper The Ottawa Citizen.
The results have been remarkable. First, each of the Wakefield Grannies drew from a jar the name of a partner gogo; each writes regularly to this partner. The next task was to set about raising money: Norma now sends regular sums to Rose Letwaba to distribute in line with her knowledge of local needs. And then news of Norma and her 10 fellow-Wakefield Grannies began to spread.
Soon, more grannies’ groups started popping up in Canada, at first slowly then faster following the launch of a Grandmothers to Grandmothers campaign in March 2006 by the Stephen Lewis Foundation, which supports grass-roots AIDS projects in Africa. In August 2006, in advance of the XVI International AIDS Conference held in Toronto, the Foundation brought together 200 Canadian and 100 sub-Saharan African women for a two-day ‘Grandmothers’ Gathering’ to consolidate and celebrate the movement. It succeeded magnificently.
There are now more than 140 grandmothers’ groups across Canada and the movement is spreading internationally: to date it has reached the US, New Zealand and Australia. There is currently one group in Australia − leaving plenty of room for more.
Many of the news items about the Wakefield Grannies and the movement they have set in motion quote the words of Gloria Steinem, “One day an army of grey-haired women may quietly take over the earth”. Not all the Wakefield Grannies are grey-haired (although my friend and the newspapers tell me that Norma Geggie is), indeed, not all of them are grandmothers, but there is no doubt the world would benefit from the ministrations of more such generous, compassionate and determined women.
As for meeting Norma Geggie: I’ll clear my diary the next time I hear she’s on her way.
Viva la Granny revolucion!
By Rowan Lomas
published in The Low Down to Hull News, April 11, 2007
The movement won the hearts of villagers, grandmothers in South Africa, the United Nations’ Stephen Lewis, and some say even the world. And now friends and neighbours will get to see the film that documents this huge success story of the heart right where it all started.
The Great Granny Revolution, the new documentary from wolf lake’s Rooney Productions that follows the story of the Wakefield grannies and their counterpart in Alexandra Township, south Africa, will have its world premier at Wakefield May Day festival May 5.
“I think it’s an amazing story because it has resulted in grandmothers movements starting all over Canada. There are now at least 2- in Ottawa and a lot of them are in places I went to speak about what we’re doing here,” says Norma Geggie founder of the original Wakefield group.
The Wakefield premier is part of a nine-stop Canadian tour for the documentary. The birth of the Wakefield Grannies and the filmmakers themselves is intimately tied.
At a Wakefield showing of the Rooneys’ first documentary on AIDS, a local doctor mentioned his mother, Nina Minde had been working in a clinic in Alexandra Township in Johannesburg, South Africa. She was assisting the psychiatric nurse there, Rose Letwaba, in setting up a support group for grandmothers (“Gogos” in Zulu) struggling to raise their grieving grandchildren following the death of the parents. “In 2004 Rose Letwaba visited Wakefield and spoke to a small group of people about the challenges she faced and thee generosity and courage of the Gogos themselves. The next day Norma Geggie decided to do something about it” says Wolfe Lake’s Brenda Rooney, filmmaking partner with husband Robert Rooney.
Robert began capturing the relationship on film at their first meeting in Wakefield in 2004. He has followed the ties to Alexandra Township, South Africa to understand what the relationship can accomplish financially and emotionally on either side of the Atlantic Ocean through fundraising for seeds to grow food, school fees and material to sew as well as writing letters of support. “I think it tells an interesting story... and I think it includes the granny gathering before the world AIDS Conference last August, so it tells a fairly exciting story of two or three years of development,” said Geggie.
While a rough cut for the film was shown last August at the Stephen Lewis Foundation’s Grandmothers to Grandmothers conference in Toronto, a precursor to the Worlds AIDS Conference, the final portion of the work took place during and after the meeting. Three Gogos came to the conference before heading to Wakefield to meet the community that began that very movement and helped change their lives for the better.
Tickets to the 5:00 and 7:30 p.m. showings May 5 cost $10 and are available at the door or in advance at Chez Eric Restaurant, Jamboree and solstice Books in Wakefield. Each film screening will be preceded by a short concert from the local Notables Quartet.
Following the premier, Brenda will travel to Winnipeg for the first leg of a nine-stop western tour, which includes showings in Victoria, Vancouver and Edmonton. A trailer for the documentary is available at www.rooneyproductions.com.
By Rowan Lomas
published in The Low Down to Hull News, April 11, 2007
The movement won the hearts of villagers, grandmothers in South Africa, the United Nations’ Stephen Lewis, and some say even the world. And now friends and neighbours will get to see the film that documents this huge success story of the heart right where it all started.
The Great Granny Revolution, the new documentary from wolf lake’s Rooney Productions that follows the story of the Wakefield grannies and their counterpart in Alexandra Township, south Africa, will have its world premier at Wakefield May Day festival May 5.
“I think it’s an amazing story because it has resulted in grandmothers movements starting all over Canada. There are now at least 2- in Ottawa and a lot of them are in places I went to speak about what we’re doing here,” says Norma Geggie founder of the original Wakefield group.
The Wakefield premier is part of a nine-stop Canadian tour for the documentary. The birth of the Wakefield Grannies and the filmmakers themselves is intimately tied.
At a Wakefield showing of the Rooneys’ first documentary on AIDS, a local doctor mentioned his mother, Nina Minde had been working in a clinic in Alexandra Township in Johannesburg, South Africa. She was assisting the psychiatric nurse there, Rose Letwaba, in setting up a support group for grandmothers (“Gogos” in Zulu) struggling to raise their grieving grandchildren following the death of the parents. “In 2004 Rose Letwaba visited Wakefield and spoke to a small group of people about the challenges she faced and thee generosity and courage of the Gogos themselves. The next day Norma Geggie decided to do something about it” says Wolfe Lake’s Brenda Rooney, filmmaking partner with husband Robert Rooney.
Robert began capturing the relationship on film at their first meeting in Wakefield in 2004. He has followed the ties to Alexandra Township, South Africa to understand what the relationship can accomplish financially and emotionally on either side of the Atlantic Ocean through fundraising for seeds to grow food, school fees and material to sew as well as writing letters of support. “I think it tells an interesting story... and I think it includes the granny gathering before the world AIDS Conference last August, so it tells a fairly exciting story of two or three years of development,” said Geggie.
While a rough cut for the film was shown last August at the Stephen Lewis Foundation’s Grandmothers to Grandmothers conference in Toronto, a precursor to the Worlds AIDS Conference, the final portion of the work took place during and after the meeting. Three Gogos came to the conference before heading to Wakefield to meet the community that began that very movement and helped change their lives for the better.
Tickets to the 5:00 and 7:30 p.m. showings May 5 cost $10 and are available at the door or in advance at Chez Eric Restaurant, Jamboree and solstice Books in Wakefield. Each film screening will be preceded by a short concert from the local Notables Quartet.
Following the premier, Brenda will travel to Winnipeg for the first leg of a nine-stop western tour, which includes showings in Victoria, Vancouver and Edmonton. A trailer for the documentary is available at www.rooneyproductions.com.
Fourteen-year-old guitarist stages concert for teen AIDS victims
By
Published in The Low Down to Hull & Back News, February 14, 2007
Following in the footsteps of the Wakefield Grannies, Chelsea guitar prodigy Julian Geisterfer is playing a little music for the soul and holding a benefit concert for AIDS orphans in Africa.
"I was touched by the plight of teenage orphans in Africa who are left to raise their younger siblings after their parents died of AIDS" says the 14-year-old guitarist. "I saw what the Wakefield Grannies were doing to help grandmothers in South Africa, and I thought we can do the same for teenagers."
CHILD2CHILD
The Child2Child benefit, an afternoon of jazz, blues and classical music, comes to the Wakefield United Church Feb. 25. Tickets cost $12 each or $20 for families and the money raised will go to the Grannies partner organization, the East Bank clinic, in Alexandra Township, South Africa.
"He wanted to do this and he approached the Wakefield Grannies to see if we could assist to help him reach the kids" explained Wakefield Granny Brenda Rooney. "He wanted the money to go to child-headed families. Out of 200 kids in the clinic we support there are many child-led families, and we’ll make sure it gets to them."
BUDDING STAR
A local star, Geisterfer recently performed with Chelsea folk legend Ian Tamblyn. Geisterfer’s goal is to raise $1,500 at the upcoming event.
"He’s an amazing classical and jazz guitarist... He’s just an incredibly talented child," said Rooney. "I think it’ll be a really good concert. It’s quite wonderful that young people get involved and try to do something."
For more information contact Michael Geisterfer at 613-325-4055 or email [email protected].
By
Published in The Low Down to Hull & Back News, February 14, 2007
Following in the footsteps of the Wakefield Grannies, Chelsea guitar prodigy Julian Geisterfer is playing a little music for the soul and holding a benefit concert for AIDS orphans in Africa.
"I was touched by the plight of teenage orphans in Africa who are left to raise their younger siblings after their parents died of AIDS" says the 14-year-old guitarist. "I saw what the Wakefield Grannies were doing to help grandmothers in South Africa, and I thought we can do the same for teenagers."
CHILD2CHILD
The Child2Child benefit, an afternoon of jazz, blues and classical music, comes to the Wakefield United Church Feb. 25. Tickets cost $12 each or $20 for families and the money raised will go to the Grannies partner organization, the East Bank clinic, in Alexandra Township, South Africa.
"He wanted to do this and he approached the Wakefield Grannies to see if we could assist to help him reach the kids" explained Wakefield Granny Brenda Rooney. "He wanted the money to go to child-headed families. Out of 200 kids in the clinic we support there are many child-led families, and we’ll make sure it gets to them."
BUDDING STAR
A local star, Geisterfer recently performed with Chelsea folk legend Ian Tamblyn. Geisterfer’s goal is to raise $1,500 at the upcoming event.
"He’s an amazing classical and jazz guitarist... He’s just an incredibly talented child," said Rooney. "I think it’ll be a really good concert. It’s quite wonderful that young people get involved and try to do something."
For more information contact Michael Geisterfer at 613-325-4055 or email [email protected].
2006
SOUTH AFRICA: The granny revolution JOHANNESBURG
published in Irin/Plusnews, September 2006
It started with three South African grandmothers sharing their grief at the loss of their children and supporting each other to care for their orphaned grandchildren. Five years later, their group in Alexandra, a Johannesburg township, has grown to 40 and spawned dozens of others spanning two continents, sparking what some are calling a ’granny revolution’.
On the opening day of the International AIDS Conference in Toronto last month, the three original Alexandra grandmothers led a march of 300 women through the streets of the city to raise awareness about the growing number of poor grandmothers who are parenting their grandchildren after the deaths of their own children from AIDS-related illnesses.
In sub-Saharan Africa, 40-60 percent of the estimated 13 million AIDS orphans live with their grandmothers. Instead of enjoying a restful retirement, these women are struggling to care for AIDS-afflicted family members and their children on meagre incomes, often with little or no support.
UN Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa Stephen Lewis told the recent AIDS conference in Toronto, Canada, that Africa’s grandmothers were "the unsung heroes of the continent" and called for social welfare programmes "that will recognise these essential caregivers’ contributions to society as legitimate and difficult labour, and offer the guarantee of sustainable incomes."
To this end, the Stephen Lewis Foundation launched the ’Grandmothers to Grandmothers’ campaign in March, to clone some of the benefits of pairing the Alexandra grannies with a group of 10 grandmothers in Wakefield, a small community in Ottawa, Canada.
In 2004 a Wakefield resident urged a local church minister to invite his mother, Nina Minde, to speak about the year she had just spent in South Africa. Minde had worked with Rose Letwaba, a children’s psychiatric nurse, to form the Alexandra support group. On a visit to Canada, Letwaba told the congregation she had discovered that many of the children missing appointments were being cared for by overwhelmed grandmothers.
"My experience was that not much attention was given to the grandparents, because the perception is that adults can deal with the grief on their own," Letwaba told PlusNews. "But I regarded them as silent victims of AIDS, so I started the group with three grannies and by end of that year I had 15."
She told the congregation about women like Magdaline Ramakobo, who lost her daughter and month-old grandchild to AIDS a year after losing her son to the disease, and was struggling to cope with her bereavement as well as caring for her grandson, Moses, 10, when the school referred her to Letwaba.
Letwaba introduced Ramakobo to two other women in similar circumstances, and by the time Letwaba came to Canada they had been joined by 30 others and were meeting once a week.
Norma Geggie, a retired nurse, approached Letwaba and suggested forming a local group to partner with the group in Alex, and long-distance friendships quickly formed. With support from local businesses and other community groups, the Wakefield Grannies organised concerts and other fundraisers, collecting C$10,000.
"When we were there, it was as if we’d been with them for a long time," said Ramakobo. "We come from different places but I think they know our pain better than anybody because some of them, they did lose loved ones. If you’ve lost someone you loved and you meet another one, you get connected quickly."
Ramakobo’s Wakefield counterpart, Brenda Rooney, agreed: "We’re all mothers, we all understand the capacity for terrible loss and some of us have suffered great losses."
Both groups have benefited from the connection. Rooney believes it has helped balance some of the AIDS-related stigma the Alex grannies face in their communities. "The point is that someone outside knows about the affect of AIDS on the family and they’re still working for them, still caring," she said. "It shows the outside world is not passing judgement."
For the Wakefield Grannies, there’s the joy that comes out of doing something to help, even if in a small way. "My generation is the first generation of women that have been able to have families and careers, and we’re now coming to retirement with a different frame of reference. We want it to be meaningful," Rooney said.
Geggie believes the ’Grandmother to Grandmother’ campaign is successfully matching the long-overlooked needs of African grandmothers with the desire of people to provide meaningful assistance. "You hear about tragedies all over the world but it never becomes personal like this has become."
For Ramakobo, the meeting with other African grandmothers in Toronto was significant: "There are others who’ve got more [problems] than us. You’ll find a person has seven kids and there’s no income, no pension, no help. If you meet other grannies, you share ideas, you talk about your experience, they talk about theirs. You gain something from them."
Forty Canadian granny groups attended the gathering in Toronto where they met 100 African women representing granny support groups from 11 different countries. According to Micol Zarb, Communications Director of the Stephen Lewis Foundation, this is only the beginning. As the Foundation expands its support of African grandmothers, Canadian grandmothers are forming new groups all over the country, and the funds they raise will support grandmothers throughout sub-Saharan Africa to form support groups, grow community gardens, pay for school fees and uniforms and start income- generation projects.
"There’s this unbelievable resonance," Rooney commented on the growth of the movement. "We think we have to be big and powerful to do something, but that’s not true."
published in Irin/Plusnews, September 2006
It started with three South African grandmothers sharing their grief at the loss of their children and supporting each other to care for their orphaned grandchildren. Five years later, their group in Alexandra, a Johannesburg township, has grown to 40 and spawned dozens of others spanning two continents, sparking what some are calling a ’granny revolution’.
On the opening day of the International AIDS Conference in Toronto last month, the three original Alexandra grandmothers led a march of 300 women through the streets of the city to raise awareness about the growing number of poor grandmothers who are parenting their grandchildren after the deaths of their own children from AIDS-related illnesses.
In sub-Saharan Africa, 40-60 percent of the estimated 13 million AIDS orphans live with their grandmothers. Instead of enjoying a restful retirement, these women are struggling to care for AIDS-afflicted family members and their children on meagre incomes, often with little or no support.
UN Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa Stephen Lewis told the recent AIDS conference in Toronto, Canada, that Africa’s grandmothers were "the unsung heroes of the continent" and called for social welfare programmes "that will recognise these essential caregivers’ contributions to society as legitimate and difficult labour, and offer the guarantee of sustainable incomes."
To this end, the Stephen Lewis Foundation launched the ’Grandmothers to Grandmothers’ campaign in March, to clone some of the benefits of pairing the Alexandra grannies with a group of 10 grandmothers in Wakefield, a small community in Ottawa, Canada.
In 2004 a Wakefield resident urged a local church minister to invite his mother, Nina Minde, to speak about the year she had just spent in South Africa. Minde had worked with Rose Letwaba, a children’s psychiatric nurse, to form the Alexandra support group. On a visit to Canada, Letwaba told the congregation she had discovered that many of the children missing appointments were being cared for by overwhelmed grandmothers.
"My experience was that not much attention was given to the grandparents, because the perception is that adults can deal with the grief on their own," Letwaba told PlusNews. "But I regarded them as silent victims of AIDS, so I started the group with three grannies and by end of that year I had 15."
She told the congregation about women like Magdaline Ramakobo, who lost her daughter and month-old grandchild to AIDS a year after losing her son to the disease, and was struggling to cope with her bereavement as well as caring for her grandson, Moses, 10, when the school referred her to Letwaba.
Letwaba introduced Ramakobo to two other women in similar circumstances, and by the time Letwaba came to Canada they had been joined by 30 others and were meeting once a week.
Norma Geggie, a retired nurse, approached Letwaba and suggested forming a local group to partner with the group in Alex, and long-distance friendships quickly formed. With support from local businesses and other community groups, the Wakefield Grannies organised concerts and other fundraisers, collecting C$10,000.
"When we were there, it was as if we’d been with them for a long time," said Ramakobo. "We come from different places but I think they know our pain better than anybody because some of them, they did lose loved ones. If you’ve lost someone you loved and you meet another one, you get connected quickly."
Ramakobo’s Wakefield counterpart, Brenda Rooney, agreed: "We’re all mothers, we all understand the capacity for terrible loss and some of us have suffered great losses."
Both groups have benefited from the connection. Rooney believes it has helped balance some of the AIDS-related stigma the Alex grannies face in their communities. "The point is that someone outside knows about the affect of AIDS on the family and they’re still working for them, still caring," she said. "It shows the outside world is not passing judgement."
For the Wakefield Grannies, there’s the joy that comes out of doing something to help, even if in a small way. "My generation is the first generation of women that have been able to have families and careers, and we’re now coming to retirement with a different frame of reference. We want it to be meaningful," Rooney said.
Geggie believes the ’Grandmother to Grandmother’ campaign is successfully matching the long-overlooked needs of African grandmothers with the desire of people to provide meaningful assistance. "You hear about tragedies all over the world but it never becomes personal like this has become."
For Ramakobo, the meeting with other African grandmothers in Toronto was significant: "There are others who’ve got more [problems] than us. You’ll find a person has seven kids and there’s no income, no pension, no help. If you meet other grannies, you share ideas, you talk about your experience, they talk about theirs. You gain something from them."
Forty Canadian granny groups attended the gathering in Toronto where they met 100 African women representing granny support groups from 11 different countries. According to Micol Zarb, Communications Director of the Stephen Lewis Foundation, this is only the beginning. As the Foundation expands its support of African grandmothers, Canadian grandmothers are forming new groups all over the country, and the funds they raise will support grandmothers throughout sub-Saharan Africa to form support groups, grow community gardens, pay for school fees and uniforms and start income- generation projects.
"There’s this unbelievable resonance," Rooney commented on the growth of the movement. "We think we have to be big and powerful to do something, but that’s not true."
(Photo: Kristy Siegfried/IRIN)
African grannies amazed by beauty of Wakefield
By Don Butler
published in the Ottawa Citizen, August 16, 2006
In her real life, Petronella Makhanya lives in the Johannesburg slum of Alexandra Township, where she struggles to raise four AIDS orphans ranging in age from 20 months to 14 years. Yesterday, rather miraculously, she found herself standing on Linda Gorka’s lawn in Wakefield, Que., eating samosas and salads, enjoying the finest view in town. Ms. Makhanya, 57, is one of three South African grandmothers — known in Africa as gogos — visiting the village as guests of the Wakefield Grannies, a group that’s supporting 10 grandmothers from Alexandra Township who are raising their grandchildren and others orphaned by AIDS. Along with nurse Rose Letwaba, the three arrived in Wakefield on Sunday night after attending a meeting of African and Canadian grandmothers in Toronto organized by the Stephen Lewis Foundation. They leave Wakefield today to begin the long journey back to Africa. The contrast between their home and the picturesque Quebec village could hardly be more stark. "We have never seen such a place," marvels one of the African grandmothers, Lucia Mazibuko, taking in the verdant hills and sparkling waters of the Gatineau River. "For my grannies to be in this part of Canada is something they never expected," says Ms. Letwaba. "This experience will remain with them as long as they live. "Our land is dry and thirsty," she says. "You see Canada and you think, ’this just can’t be.’" She recounts a conversation with Magdeline Ramakobo, one of the visiting gogos. "She said, ’I think maybe this is a dream.’" Then there’s food. In Alex, there’s never enough. In Canada, says Ms. Letwaba, "they could snack and drink all the time." Declares the ebullient Ms. Ramakobo: "I’m eating everything that I see." Ms. Makhanya shares the general delight with Wakefield. "It’s just such a cool place," she exclaims, a reference not to its hipness, but to the pleasant temperatures that have prevailed this week. She’s even more enthusiastic about the Wakefield Grannies, and the difference they have made in her life and the lives of her fellow gogos. "Really, we have the best group," she says. "We are always saying, ’thanks, God.’ We were crying before, but they have wiped our tears away." Ms. Letwaba, whose talk at the village’s United Church two years ago was the catalyst for the Wakefield Grannies, never expected the relationship to become so important. She credits the leadership provided by Norma Geggie, the Wakefield Grannies’ 81-year-old founder who, like her, is a nurse. "She’s just an amazing woman." For the gogos, the Wakefield group "is like an extension of sisterhood," she says. "They feel emotionally supported." That sense of support extends to the whole Wakefield community, she adds. Residents have approached the gogos on the street to express their solidarity. "The support and love the Wakefield community has shown us is just phenomenal." Despite dealing with culture shock, the African grandmothers have quickly adjusted to life in Wakefield. Earlier this week, they went on a shopping spree at a nearby Giant Tiger, snapping up clothes for their young charges back in Alexandra Township. Yesterday, they checked out the Wakefield steam train and took a short cruise on the Gatineau River. And last night, they were guests of honour at a public event at the village’s United Church. Yet it’s impossible to forget about those left behind in South Africa for very long. "Now I’m thinking of them," Ms. Makhanya says of her four young charges. "I’m missing them a lot now." When their short time in Canada is done, says Ms. Letwaba, reality will hit hard. "I know the minute I step inside my house," she says, "I’ll feel the emptiness." International AIDs Conference.
By Don Butler
published in the Ottawa Citizen, August 16, 2006
In her real life, Petronella Makhanya lives in the Johannesburg slum of Alexandra Township, where she struggles to raise four AIDS orphans ranging in age from 20 months to 14 years. Yesterday, rather miraculously, she found herself standing on Linda Gorka’s lawn in Wakefield, Que., eating samosas and salads, enjoying the finest view in town. Ms. Makhanya, 57, is one of three South African grandmothers — known in Africa as gogos — visiting the village as guests of the Wakefield Grannies, a group that’s supporting 10 grandmothers from Alexandra Township who are raising their grandchildren and others orphaned by AIDS. Along with nurse Rose Letwaba, the three arrived in Wakefield on Sunday night after attending a meeting of African and Canadian grandmothers in Toronto organized by the Stephen Lewis Foundation. They leave Wakefield today to begin the long journey back to Africa. The contrast between their home and the picturesque Quebec village could hardly be more stark. "We have never seen such a place," marvels one of the African grandmothers, Lucia Mazibuko, taking in the verdant hills and sparkling waters of the Gatineau River. "For my grannies to be in this part of Canada is something they never expected," says Ms. Letwaba. "This experience will remain with them as long as they live. "Our land is dry and thirsty," she says. "You see Canada and you think, ’this just can’t be.’" She recounts a conversation with Magdeline Ramakobo, one of the visiting gogos. "She said, ’I think maybe this is a dream.’" Then there’s food. In Alex, there’s never enough. In Canada, says Ms. Letwaba, "they could snack and drink all the time." Declares the ebullient Ms. Ramakobo: "I’m eating everything that I see." Ms. Makhanya shares the general delight with Wakefield. "It’s just such a cool place," she exclaims, a reference not to its hipness, but to the pleasant temperatures that have prevailed this week. She’s even more enthusiastic about the Wakefield Grannies, and the difference they have made in her life and the lives of her fellow gogos. "Really, we have the best group," she says. "We are always saying, ’thanks, God.’ We were crying before, but they have wiped our tears away." Ms. Letwaba, whose talk at the village’s United Church two years ago was the catalyst for the Wakefield Grannies, never expected the relationship to become so important. She credits the leadership provided by Norma Geggie, the Wakefield Grannies’ 81-year-old founder who, like her, is a nurse. "She’s just an amazing woman." For the gogos, the Wakefield group "is like an extension of sisterhood," she says. "They feel emotionally supported." That sense of support extends to the whole Wakefield community, she adds. Residents have approached the gogos on the street to express their solidarity. "The support and love the Wakefield community has shown us is just phenomenal." Despite dealing with culture shock, the African grandmothers have quickly adjusted to life in Wakefield. Earlier this week, they went on a shopping spree at a nearby Giant Tiger, snapping up clothes for their young charges back in Alexandra Township. Yesterday, they checked out the Wakefield steam train and took a short cruise on the Gatineau River. And last night, they were guests of honour at a public event at the village’s United Church. Yet it’s impossible to forget about those left behind in South Africa for very long. "Now I’m thinking of them," Ms. Makhanya says of her four young charges. "I’m missing them a lot now." When their short time in Canada is done, says Ms. Letwaba, reality will hit hard. "I know the minute I step inside my house," she says, "I’ll feel the emptiness." International AIDs Conference.
The great granny revolution
By Don Butler
published in the Ottawa Citizen, August 13, 2006
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One day, an army of grey-haired women may quietly take over the Earth.
— Gloria Steinem
In a room in Ottawa’s Bell Street United Church, the Wakefield Grannies are waiting. Spartan wooden chairs are arrayed in an anticipatory circle, and bare tables are laden with pastries, somosas and fruit juices. The outside temperature is sinking with the late-March sun, but the room vibrates with warmth and barely suppressed excitement.
For the 11 women who make up the Wakefield Grannies, this is a triumphant day. Their brilliant idea — the idea that brought them together and forged an extended family spanning two continents — is about to receive the ultimate validation. Any minute, Stephen Lewis will arrive to pay homage to their efforts on behalf of struggling strangers an ocean away in Africa.
Two weeks earlier in Toronto, the Stephen Lewis Foundation had unveiled an inspired initiative. Called the Grandmothers to Grandmothers campaign, it aims to mobilize support for "Africa’s unrecognized heroes" — impoverished matriarchs with the daunting task of raising growing numbers of the 13 million children orphaned by AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.
Extended families are raising nine out of 10 of these orphans. And as more women die of HIV/AIDS, the burden of care is increasingly shifting on to maternal grandparents. In Botswana and Malawi, more than half the orphaned children now live in grandparent-headed households; in South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe, it’s nearly two-thirds.
"There are situations where grandmothers are looking after five, 10, 15, 20 kids," Lewis had said at the March 7 campaign launch, "their own, and other orphans in the villages who have no environment within which to exist."
What Lewis hadn’t known until just before the foundation’s press conference was that, in a parallel universe along the Gatineau River, a yoga-practising octogenarian had conceived the same idea nearly 18 months earlier. After hearing a South African nurse speak about the grandmothers’ plight, Norma Geggie swiftly recruited 10 women to the cause. And before you could say gogo (the Zulu word for grandmother), the Wakefield Grannies were born.
They’ve since paired up with 10 members of the Gogo Granny Outreach Project in the Johannesburg slum suburb of Alexandra Township, a group of 40 impoverished women who are raising nearly 160 children orphaned by AIDS. The Wakefield Grannies have raised close to $10,000, written letters and exchanged pictures and songs with their African partners. In the process, they’ve developed an unshakable bond with these burdened elders. Now Stephen Lewis, the UN’s special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, is dropping by to thank them.
They’re a diverse group, these Grannies. "We’re real individuals," says Geggie, the 81-year-old doyenne of one of Wakefield’s most prominent families. "You have no idea."
There’s a social worker, a sculptor, two or three teachers and a filmmaker who, with her husband, is shooting a documentary about the group. Two are French-Canadian, two are English-Canadian. Others were born in India, France, Poland, Germany, Australia, Scotland and England. At various times, four have lived in Africa. Some, like Brenda Rooney, the filmmaker, aren’t even grandmothers. But that’s a mere technicality. Their spirit defines them — that, and their devotion to a band of African women thrust back into the rigours of child-rearing by the scourge of HIV/AIDS.
"These women are doing something that we would shudder at the thought of doing — taking in our grandchildren," explains Geggie. "Their story can break our hearts, but what really warms our hearts is that fact that we’re very connected with them. We feel as though we’re making a difference in their lives, and I think we feel that our lives have been enriched by the contact."
Since March, more than 40 Canadian granny groups — including two other groups in Ottawa — have formed.
"That’s a lovely response," declares Ilana Landsberg-Lewis, the Stephen Lewis Foundation’s executive director. But lest you think it is sufficient, she quickly adds: "Another 150 would be good."
The Wakefield Grannies are in the vanguard of this nascent movement, she says. "They had already started to do what we were suggesting to grandmothers around the country they might want to do."
Brenda Rooney knows they’re special. "I hang out with these 10 crazy women," she says, with fierce affection. "They don’t know just how wonderful they are."
Norma Geggie was a young Australian nurse working in England in 1953 when she and a friend responded to a newspaper ad seeking nurses for a new hospital in Wakefield, founded by Dr. Howard Geggie and staffed by him and two physician sons. A third son, Stuart, who was studying medicine in London, met them before they sailed for Canada. "We said he had been sent to see if we had two heads," jokes Norma, an articulate, diminutive woman with close-cropped grey hair and owlish glasses.
That Christmas, Stuart Geggie made a brief visit to Wakefield. "We were sort of thrown together for about 10 days," Norma recalls coyly. A few months later, Norma left for England, "thinking we’d get to know each other a little better." Stuart proposed as she stepped off the boat. They were together until Stuart’s death in 1997.
After their marriage, Stuart worked at the Wakefield hospital, while Norma devoted herself to raising their three children (one is jazz musician John Geggie) and threw herself into volunteer work.
"She’s a dynamo," Brenda Rooney exclaims of Norma Geggie. Over the past three decades, Norma has written or co-authored with her late husband eight books of area history. She makes few concessions to her 81 years. "If you’re hiking with her," marvels Brenda, who’s a quarter-century younger, "you have to work to keep up."
The story of how Norma conceived the idea for the Wakefield Grannies is a winding tale of serendipity. It begins three years ago, when Brenda and her husband, Robert, who run Rooney Productions from their home near Lac-des-Loups, screened their 2002 documentary on HIV/AIDS in Africa, Condoms, Fish and Circus Tricks, at Wakefield’s United Church. The event raised $1,000 for the church’s AIDS campaign. More importantly, it set events in motion.
In the audience was Thomas Minde, a doctor at Wakefield’s hospital. His parents had just returned from a year in South Africa, where his mother, Nina, and Rose Letwaba, the head nurse at a children’s psychiatric clinic in Alexandra Township, formed a support group for grandmothers caring for AIDS orphans. Thomas Minde urged the United Church minister, Gisele Gilfillen, to contact his mother.
A few weeks later, Nina Minde spoke at a morning service. She showed pictures of the clinic and told the congregation about Rose Letwaba. Rose was planning a trip to Canada. Minde promised to bring her to Wakefield.
And so it happened that one Saturday night in the fall of 2004, Rose Letwaba spoke at the Wakefield United Church. "There weren’t very many people there," Norma remembers. "But Rose spoke very movingly."
An impromptu collection yielded about $900 — a lot for such a small group. But to Norma, it wasn’t adequate. The next day, she spotted Rose and Nina at a reception in town. She told Rose how moved people had been by her talk.
"I said, ’what if a group of women in Wakefield were to partner with these women?’ And they both agreed this would be a marvellous idea." From small encounters are world-shaking movements born.
Alexandra Township, known simply as Alex, is a tightly packed ghetto 12 kilometres from the glittering towers of downtown Johannesburg. Its 800 hectares are home to nearly 340,000 people, most poor and black. One in five households subsists on less than $200 a month.
Five years ago, South Africa’s government announced a $300-million upgrading project. It has slowly improved life, but unemployment, drug and alcohol abuse, and violence against women, children and the elderly, remain rampant.
This environment is home to Rose Letwaba’s Gogo Grannies. Most are in their 50s or 60s. A few are older. Many have health problems, and worry they won’t live long enough to raise their grandchildren. Most survive only because Rose’s clinic provides them with bags of mieliepap, an African staple made of maize meal.
And always, like a spectre, there’s the terror that HIV/AIDS, the deadly affliction that robbed them of their children, a disease few of them even understand, will strike down more loved ones, pushing the survivors closer to the precipice.
"Grandmothers of Africa are really in agony," Rose told journalists in Toronto last March. "Whether we like it or not, we have to support these grandmothers."
After Rose Letwaba’s talk, Brenda Rooney kept getting the same message: "Norma Geggie’s looking for you." Brenda and Robert Rooney had moved to the area a decade earlier from Toronto, where both worked in theatre. By the early 1980s, both were active in the anti-apartheid movement.
When Robert directed The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs, the story of a white South African lawyer imprisoned without trial by the apartheid regime, they met the cultural representative of the African National Congress, then living in exile in Toronto. Thus began a fruitful collaboration that peaked in 1998 when the Rooneys staged Mandela and the Children at Toronto’s SkyDome.
After apartheid, Brenda handled media relations during a visit to Canada by Albertina Sisulu, co-president of South Africa’s United Democratic Front and wife of Walter Sisulu, Nelson Mandela’s mentor. The experience changed her life.
Walter Sisulu had spent 27 years in prison for his politics. Albertina herself had been under house arrest for 18 years. Yet she raised 10 children, five of her own plus five she adopted. "At one point, I said to her, ’How did you do it?’" recalls Brenda, an intense woman of 56 with searching eyes and silver bangs. "’How did you maintain your humanity?’ And she said, ’The greatest fear I ever had was that I would suffer, and no one would ever know. So I’m grateful to you, because you tell my story.’ That made me realize how important it is to tell the stories. It changed me from being a publicist to being a documentary maker."
So when Norma Geggie called and invited her to be a Wakefield Granny, Brenda didn’t hesitate. Within days, 10 women had signed on. "Norma claims it was spontaneous combustion," says Brenda.
Whatever it was, large forces were at work. "Women have so many resources," says Brenda. "At a certain stage in our lives, we have time. What we need to do with it is make what we do, and what we are, meaningful."
When Robert asked for permission to film the group’s meetings, they readily agreed. He says the film — the working title is The Great Granny Revolution — is more than just a documentary about AIDS. The Wakefield Grannies are part of the first generation of highly educated, skilled professional women, he observes. "This has never really happened before. It’s a new phenomenon. And it’s only just beginning."
"I think it’s going to change society," Brenda says. Just ask Norma Geggie. "Women could run the world," she asserts in a tone that brooks no contradiction. "You realize that!"
At their inaugural meeting in November 2004, the Wakefield Grannies drew names from a jar so each could pair up with one of the Alex gogos. At their first fundraiser, the local theatre group, the Wakefield Players, read two one-act plays at the Black Sheep Inn. "It was the worst storm of the season to that date, and the place was filled," recalls Norma. The event raised $2,000. "We realized then we were more than a small group," she says. "We had a whole community behind us."
Last September, a concert on Wakefield’s covered bridge brought in $4,000. The Great Granny Concert will be staged again this fall. In December, the Tooth Fairies, a group of area quilters, raised $1,400. Cheques for $100 started showing up in Norma’s mailbox. Chez Eric’s, a Wakefield restaurant, donated 50 cents from the sale of each cup of specialty coffee.
Even area children pitched in. Eight-year-old Sam Kennelly of Masham collected $168.67 by asking friends to donate money in lieu of birthday presents. Charlotte Connolly, an 11-year-old at Chelsea Elementary School, earned $53 from the sale of AIDS pins.
Norma forwards the money to Rose Letwaba. "We let them determine where the need is," she says. Rose uses some of the money to buy food for the grandmothers and their young charges. Her most ingenious idea was an overnight outing for the gogos, a respite from their care-worn lives. "Most of them had never, ever slept away," says Brenda. "Some had never slept in beds." Afterwards, says Norma, "they just said, ’now we know what heaven’s like.’"
The Grannies write regularly to their gogos. Those who are able write back with news. Not surprisingly, it’s often calamitous. Last March, Linda Gorka, one of the Wakefield Grannies, learned that her gogo had died. "We were all very affected by it," says Norma.
Around the same time, Brenda heard from her African partner, Magdeline Ramakobo, who’s raising her grandson Moses. In her letter, she apologizes for not responding sooner to Brenda’s last missive.
"It arrived at the time when I was so worried about my husband’s health," she writes. "He was sick, and I was running up and down, taking him to the doctor’s, going to the clinics until I just sit down with him because I didn’t have any money any more for doctors and transport to take him to and fro, so my head was spinning." Not long after, she writes, her husband died.
That sort of personal contact is, however, atypical of how most of the new Canadian grandmother groups operate. "We’re discouraging people from twinning," says Landsberg-Lewis. "It’s difficult to maintain, and it’s onerous for the grandmothers in Africa quite often."
Besides, she says, the need is practically infinite. As one project reaches capacity, "we can turn the funds to the next project that comes along that’s equally in need and desperate for support."
Even the Wakefield Grannies are talking about setting aside some of the money they raise so the Stephen Lewis Foundation can direct it where it’s most needed. Just don’t expect them to end their relationship with the Alex gogos. "We made a commitment to individual women as women," says Brenda Rooney. "You don’t decide you have a family, and then 18 months later, think again."
In April, Brenda and Robert Rooney returned to Africa, this time to shoot footage of the Gogo Grannies for their new documentary. For three weeks, they filmed at the East Bank Clinic in Alex, where the Gogo Grannies meet every Wednesday, and in the grandmothers’ own humble homes. Once the gogos saw the Rooneys were genuinely interested in them, "they totally opened their hearts to us," Brenda says.
Brenda’s gogo, Magdeline Ramakobo, walked through oppressive heat to the clinic. "As she arrived, my heart was just going thump," says Brenda. "I started walking toward her, and by the time we were within touching distance, we were both crying."
Magdeline told Brenda of her terrible loneliness since her husband’s death. But she also told her that because of her Canadian friend, her family treats her with respect. "All of the women are so proud of their partner, their friend," says Brenda. "It gives them a sense of meaning and importance in their lives, that somebody cares." Just like Albertina Sisulu, it was critical their stories be known.
Those stories are woven from the small details of everyday lives. Like Petronella Makhanya rising at 5 a.m. each day to hang laundry on the communal clothesline for the four orphans she is raising. Like the delighted pride Caslina Mkhutshula expressed when her twin grandchildren, who she’s raising in a tiny house without water or electricity, earned A averages at school.
The connection to the Wakefield Grannies also helps dissolve the terrible stigma that burdens those with HIV/AIDS in Africa, a shame that leads neighbours to freeze out afflicted families. "I hadn’t understood that until I was actually there," says Brenda.
What impressed her most about the gogos was their huge capacity to love, and to find humour and solace in one another. "They’re just so brave."
On their return to Canada, the Rooneys invited the Grannies, their families and others to view some of their African footage. One scene featured Lucia Mazibuko, who has lost two daughters, a son-in-law and a grandson to HIV/AIDS. Now she’s caring for her two remaining grandsons, one of whom is HIV-positive. At one point Lucia tells Brenda, "I know I killed my daughter." Once she found out what was making her daughter ill, she locked her up so no one would learn her shameful secret.
The interview, says Brenda, "just devastated the Wakefield women. They were sharing the Kleenex box." But it strengthened their resolve. "They’re totally convinced they’re doing exactly the right thing."
Robert Rooney, camera dangling like a third appendage, is the first to spot Stephen Lewis as he approaches Bell Street United Church. "They’re coming," he warns the Grannies.
Humble, gracious and eloquent in equal measure, Lewis quickly puts everyone at ease. He relates his own experience with the Gogo Grannies, whom he first encountered three years ago. Most of his time with them, he says, has been spent sitting under the trees, talking about their lives and the children they’ve lost. "Mostly they want food. Everybody’s hungry."
And he updates them on the Granny Gathering, the summer conference in Toronto his foundation is organizing, which will bring together some 100 African and 200 Canadian grandmothers. "We thought we’d put them up in Wakefield," he jokes. "We’re ready," Brenda fires back.
(In fact, the conference is this very weekend, and afterward, four Gogo Grannies, including Rose Letwaba, will visit Wakefield for three days.)
Lewis expresses his profound gratitude. "This has triggered a chord," he says. "Something is resonating with people deeply and strongly." He pauses. "Thank you all truly, madly, deeply. In my life, this is a highlight."
That’s no less true for the Wakefield Grannies. "You get to realize that with these horrendous situations," says Norma, "the only way to make a difference is just little by little. I hope it spreads worldwide."
By Don Butler
published in the Ottawa Citizen, August 13, 2006
view video
One day, an army of grey-haired women may quietly take over the Earth.
— Gloria Steinem
In a room in Ottawa’s Bell Street United Church, the Wakefield Grannies are waiting. Spartan wooden chairs are arrayed in an anticipatory circle, and bare tables are laden with pastries, somosas and fruit juices. The outside temperature is sinking with the late-March sun, but the room vibrates with warmth and barely suppressed excitement.
For the 11 women who make up the Wakefield Grannies, this is a triumphant day. Their brilliant idea — the idea that brought them together and forged an extended family spanning two continents — is about to receive the ultimate validation. Any minute, Stephen Lewis will arrive to pay homage to their efforts on behalf of struggling strangers an ocean away in Africa.
Two weeks earlier in Toronto, the Stephen Lewis Foundation had unveiled an inspired initiative. Called the Grandmothers to Grandmothers campaign, it aims to mobilize support for "Africa’s unrecognized heroes" — impoverished matriarchs with the daunting task of raising growing numbers of the 13 million children orphaned by AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.
Extended families are raising nine out of 10 of these orphans. And as more women die of HIV/AIDS, the burden of care is increasingly shifting on to maternal grandparents. In Botswana and Malawi, more than half the orphaned children now live in grandparent-headed households; in South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe, it’s nearly two-thirds.
"There are situations where grandmothers are looking after five, 10, 15, 20 kids," Lewis had said at the March 7 campaign launch, "their own, and other orphans in the villages who have no environment within which to exist."
What Lewis hadn’t known until just before the foundation’s press conference was that, in a parallel universe along the Gatineau River, a yoga-practising octogenarian had conceived the same idea nearly 18 months earlier. After hearing a South African nurse speak about the grandmothers’ plight, Norma Geggie swiftly recruited 10 women to the cause. And before you could say gogo (the Zulu word for grandmother), the Wakefield Grannies were born.
They’ve since paired up with 10 members of the Gogo Granny Outreach Project in the Johannesburg slum suburb of Alexandra Township, a group of 40 impoverished women who are raising nearly 160 children orphaned by AIDS. The Wakefield Grannies have raised close to $10,000, written letters and exchanged pictures and songs with their African partners. In the process, they’ve developed an unshakable bond with these burdened elders. Now Stephen Lewis, the UN’s special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, is dropping by to thank them.
They’re a diverse group, these Grannies. "We’re real individuals," says Geggie, the 81-year-old doyenne of one of Wakefield’s most prominent families. "You have no idea."
There’s a social worker, a sculptor, two or three teachers and a filmmaker who, with her husband, is shooting a documentary about the group. Two are French-Canadian, two are English-Canadian. Others were born in India, France, Poland, Germany, Australia, Scotland and England. At various times, four have lived in Africa. Some, like Brenda Rooney, the filmmaker, aren’t even grandmothers. But that’s a mere technicality. Their spirit defines them — that, and their devotion to a band of African women thrust back into the rigours of child-rearing by the scourge of HIV/AIDS.
"These women are doing something that we would shudder at the thought of doing — taking in our grandchildren," explains Geggie. "Their story can break our hearts, but what really warms our hearts is that fact that we’re very connected with them. We feel as though we’re making a difference in their lives, and I think we feel that our lives have been enriched by the contact."
Since March, more than 40 Canadian granny groups — including two other groups in Ottawa — have formed.
"That’s a lovely response," declares Ilana Landsberg-Lewis, the Stephen Lewis Foundation’s executive director. But lest you think it is sufficient, she quickly adds: "Another 150 would be good."
The Wakefield Grannies are in the vanguard of this nascent movement, she says. "They had already started to do what we were suggesting to grandmothers around the country they might want to do."
Brenda Rooney knows they’re special. "I hang out with these 10 crazy women," she says, with fierce affection. "They don’t know just how wonderful they are."
Norma Geggie was a young Australian nurse working in England in 1953 when she and a friend responded to a newspaper ad seeking nurses for a new hospital in Wakefield, founded by Dr. Howard Geggie and staffed by him and two physician sons. A third son, Stuart, who was studying medicine in London, met them before they sailed for Canada. "We said he had been sent to see if we had two heads," jokes Norma, an articulate, diminutive woman with close-cropped grey hair and owlish glasses.
That Christmas, Stuart Geggie made a brief visit to Wakefield. "We were sort of thrown together for about 10 days," Norma recalls coyly. A few months later, Norma left for England, "thinking we’d get to know each other a little better." Stuart proposed as she stepped off the boat. They were together until Stuart’s death in 1997.
After their marriage, Stuart worked at the Wakefield hospital, while Norma devoted herself to raising their three children (one is jazz musician John Geggie) and threw herself into volunteer work.
"She’s a dynamo," Brenda Rooney exclaims of Norma Geggie. Over the past three decades, Norma has written or co-authored with her late husband eight books of area history. She makes few concessions to her 81 years. "If you’re hiking with her," marvels Brenda, who’s a quarter-century younger, "you have to work to keep up."
The story of how Norma conceived the idea for the Wakefield Grannies is a winding tale of serendipity. It begins three years ago, when Brenda and her husband, Robert, who run Rooney Productions from their home near Lac-des-Loups, screened their 2002 documentary on HIV/AIDS in Africa, Condoms, Fish and Circus Tricks, at Wakefield’s United Church. The event raised $1,000 for the church’s AIDS campaign. More importantly, it set events in motion.
In the audience was Thomas Minde, a doctor at Wakefield’s hospital. His parents had just returned from a year in South Africa, where his mother, Nina, and Rose Letwaba, the head nurse at a children’s psychiatric clinic in Alexandra Township, formed a support group for grandmothers caring for AIDS orphans. Thomas Minde urged the United Church minister, Gisele Gilfillen, to contact his mother.
A few weeks later, Nina Minde spoke at a morning service. She showed pictures of the clinic and told the congregation about Rose Letwaba. Rose was planning a trip to Canada. Minde promised to bring her to Wakefield.
And so it happened that one Saturday night in the fall of 2004, Rose Letwaba spoke at the Wakefield United Church. "There weren’t very many people there," Norma remembers. "But Rose spoke very movingly."
An impromptu collection yielded about $900 — a lot for such a small group. But to Norma, it wasn’t adequate. The next day, she spotted Rose and Nina at a reception in town. She told Rose how moved people had been by her talk.
"I said, ’what if a group of women in Wakefield were to partner with these women?’ And they both agreed this would be a marvellous idea." From small encounters are world-shaking movements born.
Alexandra Township, known simply as Alex, is a tightly packed ghetto 12 kilometres from the glittering towers of downtown Johannesburg. Its 800 hectares are home to nearly 340,000 people, most poor and black. One in five households subsists on less than $200 a month.
Five years ago, South Africa’s government announced a $300-million upgrading project. It has slowly improved life, but unemployment, drug and alcohol abuse, and violence against women, children and the elderly, remain rampant.
This environment is home to Rose Letwaba’s Gogo Grannies. Most are in their 50s or 60s. A few are older. Many have health problems, and worry they won’t live long enough to raise their grandchildren. Most survive only because Rose’s clinic provides them with bags of mieliepap, an African staple made of maize meal.
And always, like a spectre, there’s the terror that HIV/AIDS, the deadly affliction that robbed them of their children, a disease few of them even understand, will strike down more loved ones, pushing the survivors closer to the precipice.
"Grandmothers of Africa are really in agony," Rose told journalists in Toronto last March. "Whether we like it or not, we have to support these grandmothers."
After Rose Letwaba’s talk, Brenda Rooney kept getting the same message: "Norma Geggie’s looking for you." Brenda and Robert Rooney had moved to the area a decade earlier from Toronto, where both worked in theatre. By the early 1980s, both were active in the anti-apartheid movement.
When Robert directed The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs, the story of a white South African lawyer imprisoned without trial by the apartheid regime, they met the cultural representative of the African National Congress, then living in exile in Toronto. Thus began a fruitful collaboration that peaked in 1998 when the Rooneys staged Mandela and the Children at Toronto’s SkyDome.
After apartheid, Brenda handled media relations during a visit to Canada by Albertina Sisulu, co-president of South Africa’s United Democratic Front and wife of Walter Sisulu, Nelson Mandela’s mentor. The experience changed her life.
Walter Sisulu had spent 27 years in prison for his politics. Albertina herself had been under house arrest for 18 years. Yet she raised 10 children, five of her own plus five she adopted. "At one point, I said to her, ’How did you do it?’" recalls Brenda, an intense woman of 56 with searching eyes and silver bangs. "’How did you maintain your humanity?’ And she said, ’The greatest fear I ever had was that I would suffer, and no one would ever know. So I’m grateful to you, because you tell my story.’ That made me realize how important it is to tell the stories. It changed me from being a publicist to being a documentary maker."
So when Norma Geggie called and invited her to be a Wakefield Granny, Brenda didn’t hesitate. Within days, 10 women had signed on. "Norma claims it was spontaneous combustion," says Brenda.
Whatever it was, large forces were at work. "Women have so many resources," says Brenda. "At a certain stage in our lives, we have time. What we need to do with it is make what we do, and what we are, meaningful."
When Robert asked for permission to film the group’s meetings, they readily agreed. He says the film — the working title is The Great Granny Revolution — is more than just a documentary about AIDS. The Wakefield Grannies are part of the first generation of highly educated, skilled professional women, he observes. "This has never really happened before. It’s a new phenomenon. And it’s only just beginning."
"I think it’s going to change society," Brenda says. Just ask Norma Geggie. "Women could run the world," she asserts in a tone that brooks no contradiction. "You realize that!"
At their inaugural meeting in November 2004, the Wakefield Grannies drew names from a jar so each could pair up with one of the Alex gogos. At their first fundraiser, the local theatre group, the Wakefield Players, read two one-act plays at the Black Sheep Inn. "It was the worst storm of the season to that date, and the place was filled," recalls Norma. The event raised $2,000. "We realized then we were more than a small group," she says. "We had a whole community behind us."
Last September, a concert on Wakefield’s covered bridge brought in $4,000. The Great Granny Concert will be staged again this fall. In December, the Tooth Fairies, a group of area quilters, raised $1,400. Cheques for $100 started showing up in Norma’s mailbox. Chez Eric’s, a Wakefield restaurant, donated 50 cents from the sale of each cup of specialty coffee.
Even area children pitched in. Eight-year-old Sam Kennelly of Masham collected $168.67 by asking friends to donate money in lieu of birthday presents. Charlotte Connolly, an 11-year-old at Chelsea Elementary School, earned $53 from the sale of AIDS pins.
Norma forwards the money to Rose Letwaba. "We let them determine where the need is," she says. Rose uses some of the money to buy food for the grandmothers and their young charges. Her most ingenious idea was an overnight outing for the gogos, a respite from their care-worn lives. "Most of them had never, ever slept away," says Brenda. "Some had never slept in beds." Afterwards, says Norma, "they just said, ’now we know what heaven’s like.’"
The Grannies write regularly to their gogos. Those who are able write back with news. Not surprisingly, it’s often calamitous. Last March, Linda Gorka, one of the Wakefield Grannies, learned that her gogo had died. "We were all very affected by it," says Norma.
Around the same time, Brenda heard from her African partner, Magdeline Ramakobo, who’s raising her grandson Moses. In her letter, she apologizes for not responding sooner to Brenda’s last missive.
"It arrived at the time when I was so worried about my husband’s health," she writes. "He was sick, and I was running up and down, taking him to the doctor’s, going to the clinics until I just sit down with him because I didn’t have any money any more for doctors and transport to take him to and fro, so my head was spinning." Not long after, she writes, her husband died.
That sort of personal contact is, however, atypical of how most of the new Canadian grandmother groups operate. "We’re discouraging people from twinning," says Landsberg-Lewis. "It’s difficult to maintain, and it’s onerous for the grandmothers in Africa quite often."
Besides, she says, the need is practically infinite. As one project reaches capacity, "we can turn the funds to the next project that comes along that’s equally in need and desperate for support."
Even the Wakefield Grannies are talking about setting aside some of the money they raise so the Stephen Lewis Foundation can direct it where it’s most needed. Just don’t expect them to end their relationship with the Alex gogos. "We made a commitment to individual women as women," says Brenda Rooney. "You don’t decide you have a family, and then 18 months later, think again."
In April, Brenda and Robert Rooney returned to Africa, this time to shoot footage of the Gogo Grannies for their new documentary. For three weeks, they filmed at the East Bank Clinic in Alex, where the Gogo Grannies meet every Wednesday, and in the grandmothers’ own humble homes. Once the gogos saw the Rooneys were genuinely interested in them, "they totally opened their hearts to us," Brenda says.
Brenda’s gogo, Magdeline Ramakobo, walked through oppressive heat to the clinic. "As she arrived, my heart was just going thump," says Brenda. "I started walking toward her, and by the time we were within touching distance, we were both crying."
Magdeline told Brenda of her terrible loneliness since her husband’s death. But she also told her that because of her Canadian friend, her family treats her with respect. "All of the women are so proud of their partner, their friend," says Brenda. "It gives them a sense of meaning and importance in their lives, that somebody cares." Just like Albertina Sisulu, it was critical their stories be known.
Those stories are woven from the small details of everyday lives. Like Petronella Makhanya rising at 5 a.m. each day to hang laundry on the communal clothesline for the four orphans she is raising. Like the delighted pride Caslina Mkhutshula expressed when her twin grandchildren, who she’s raising in a tiny house without water or electricity, earned A averages at school.
The connection to the Wakefield Grannies also helps dissolve the terrible stigma that burdens those with HIV/AIDS in Africa, a shame that leads neighbours to freeze out afflicted families. "I hadn’t understood that until I was actually there," says Brenda.
What impressed her most about the gogos was their huge capacity to love, and to find humour and solace in one another. "They’re just so brave."
On their return to Canada, the Rooneys invited the Grannies, their families and others to view some of their African footage. One scene featured Lucia Mazibuko, who has lost two daughters, a son-in-law and a grandson to HIV/AIDS. Now she’s caring for her two remaining grandsons, one of whom is HIV-positive. At one point Lucia tells Brenda, "I know I killed my daughter." Once she found out what was making her daughter ill, she locked her up so no one would learn her shameful secret.
The interview, says Brenda, "just devastated the Wakefield women. They were sharing the Kleenex box." But it strengthened their resolve. "They’re totally convinced they’re doing exactly the right thing."
Robert Rooney, camera dangling like a third appendage, is the first to spot Stephen Lewis as he approaches Bell Street United Church. "They’re coming," he warns the Grannies.
Humble, gracious and eloquent in equal measure, Lewis quickly puts everyone at ease. He relates his own experience with the Gogo Grannies, whom he first encountered three years ago. Most of his time with them, he says, has been spent sitting under the trees, talking about their lives and the children they’ve lost. "Mostly they want food. Everybody’s hungry."
And he updates them on the Granny Gathering, the summer conference in Toronto his foundation is organizing, which will bring together some 100 African and 200 Canadian grandmothers. "We thought we’d put them up in Wakefield," he jokes. "We’re ready," Brenda fires back.
(In fact, the conference is this very weekend, and afterward, four Gogo Grannies, including Rose Letwaba, will visit Wakefield for three days.)
Lewis expresses his profound gratitude. "This has triggered a chord," he says. "Something is resonating with people deeply and strongly." He pauses. "Thank you all truly, madly, deeply. In my life, this is a highlight."
That’s no less true for the Wakefield Grannies. "You get to realize that with these horrendous situations," says Norma, "the only way to make a difference is just little by little. I hope it spreads worldwide."
Inspiration for national aid movement returns to Wakefield
By Ian Lordon
published in The Low Down to Hull & Back News, July 2006
When South African nurse Rose Letwaba first visited Wakefield 18 months ago she couldn’t have known she was sowing the seeds of what would later become a national movement in Canada. But that’s exactly what grew out of her first visit, and now she’s coming back to the village with three South African grannies in tow for a Granny Gathering Aug. 15.
“The very first granny group began in Wakefield and now there are 45 groups across Canada. None of us ever dreamt it would explode like this,” Gathering organizer Brenda Rooney said. “Wakefield should be very proud. It’s a huge national movement and these women coming here is a closing of the circle that began in Wakefield.” Letwaba is back, accompanied by Magdeline Ramakobo, Lucia Mazibuko, and Petronella Makhanya- three Alexandra grandmothers who were partnered with Wakefield grannies after the nurse first visited the community a year and a half ago. Inspired by Letwaba’s tales of AIDS-ravaged South Africa and the plight of grandmothers there forced to take on the burden of raising grandchildren orphaned by the pandemic, the Wakefield grannies decided to help. What began as simple community acts of charity and solidarity has since blossomed into national campaign, and three South African women touched by it will share their experiences at the Granny Gathering. “They’re incredible women. It’s hard to imagine living on nothing and taking on the raising of children,” Rooney said. “It’s going to be an opportunity for people to hear from them and then talk to them informally. I think everyone will be blown away and inspired.” The Granny Gathering will be held at the Wakefield United Church, Aug. 15, at 7:00 p.m. Admission is free.
By Ian Lordon
published in The Low Down to Hull & Back News, July 2006
When South African nurse Rose Letwaba first visited Wakefield 18 months ago she couldn’t have known she was sowing the seeds of what would later become a national movement in Canada. But that’s exactly what grew out of her first visit, and now she’s coming back to the village with three South African grannies in tow for a Granny Gathering Aug. 15.
“The very first granny group began in Wakefield and now there are 45 groups across Canada. None of us ever dreamt it would explode like this,” Gathering organizer Brenda Rooney said. “Wakefield should be very proud. It’s a huge national movement and these women coming here is a closing of the circle that began in Wakefield.” Letwaba is back, accompanied by Magdeline Ramakobo, Lucia Mazibuko, and Petronella Makhanya- three Alexandra grandmothers who were partnered with Wakefield grannies after the nurse first visited the community a year and a half ago. Inspired by Letwaba’s tales of AIDS-ravaged South Africa and the plight of grandmothers there forced to take on the burden of raising grandchildren orphaned by the pandemic, the Wakefield grannies decided to help. What began as simple community acts of charity and solidarity has since blossomed into national campaign, and three South African women touched by it will share their experiences at the Granny Gathering. “They’re incredible women. It’s hard to imagine living on nothing and taking on the raising of children,” Rooney said. “It’s going to be an opportunity for people to hear from them and then talk to them informally. I think everyone will be blown away and inspired.” The Granny Gathering will be held at the Wakefield United Church, Aug. 15, at 7:00 p.m. Admission is free.
Local filmakers document grandmotherly compassion from Wakefield to South Africa
By Rowan Lomas
published in The Low Down to Hull & Back News, May 2006
A grandmother hangs laundry with a baby on her back before bathing three more children, feeding them breakfast in a one-room apartment and getting them off to school.
This scene of children orphaned by AIDS and the grandmothers who look after them in South Africa will be part of a documentary by Lac-des-Loups’ Robert and Brenda Rooney. They returned from the AIDS-ravaged Alexandra Township shantytown earlier this month after three weeks of shooting the final footage for their upcoming documentary The Great Granny Revolution, which follows the Wakefield Grannies’ relationship with the Alexandra GoGos (a group of South African grandmothers) since it began almost two years ago. For Brenda, a founding member of the Wakefield group, to see someone who has lost her children raise a second generation in poverty was a heart wrenching experience.
The Rooney’s set their lens on Petronella Makharya. While two of her charges are her grandchildren, the other two she adopted and nurtured back to health, learned Brenda one morning when she went to the South African woman’s shack to film. Makharya shows amazing courage, says Rooney, though she doesn’t know how she’ll survive the next month.
“She was told the baby would die but she nursed this baby who’s now this chubby, cute bundle. This woman has nothing, but she gets up every morning at 5:00 a.m..” Rooney fights back her tears as she describes Makharya’s situation. “This is what we’re supporting, this is what we wanted to capture with the filming.”
The film intends to show what a relationship between grandmothers on either side of the Atlantic can accomplish, whether it be fundraising for seeds to grow food, school fees and material to sew, or providing important emotional support through personal letter-writing.
“They need each other but they also need to feel there is help coming and the financial support allows them to feel that if a crisis happens there is somewhere to turn and there are people there to help,” says Rooney. “This acknowledgement we’re giving helps them recover and gives back to us. There’s no charity in this, we gain so much.”
With the help of an old friend from the anti-apartheid movement, the Rooneys safely navigated the impoverished Johannesburg suburb, which Brenda says is a very dangerous place, especially for people who don’t know it very well. They were also able to film with the help of a $6,000 grant from the Stephen Lewis Foundation, which funds grassroots projects attempting to aid the struggle against AIDS in Africa.
Since making their way home, the Rooneys cut over 30 hours of tape into an hour to show the 10 other Wakefield Grannies and their supporters what their partners go through every day, and present them each with a greeting from their counterpart.
“What we saw was some of the video they shot in Alexandra which sort of blew us away,” says Norma Geggie, who began the project with an invitation to her home in the fall of 2004. “The main thing was we were tickled pink to have this feedback because it’s more personal for us and we realize it has spread beyond Wakefield.”
The Stephen Lewis Foundation’s Grandmothers to Grandmothers movement, launched this March and now 45 granny groups strong, was inspired by the relationship between the Wakefield Grannies and Alexandra GoGos. The Great Grannie Revolution has an estimated budget of $100,000 and Rooney Productions is still looking for funding to ensure the documentary is ready to be shown at the foundation’s conference coming to Toronto in the days leading up to the World AIDS Conference this August. People can learn more at www.rooneyproductions.com.
By Rowan Lomas
published in The Low Down to Hull & Back News, May 2006
A grandmother hangs laundry with a baby on her back before bathing three more children, feeding them breakfast in a one-room apartment and getting them off to school.
This scene of children orphaned by AIDS and the grandmothers who look after them in South Africa will be part of a documentary by Lac-des-Loups’ Robert and Brenda Rooney. They returned from the AIDS-ravaged Alexandra Township shantytown earlier this month after three weeks of shooting the final footage for their upcoming documentary The Great Granny Revolution, which follows the Wakefield Grannies’ relationship with the Alexandra GoGos (a group of South African grandmothers) since it began almost two years ago. For Brenda, a founding member of the Wakefield group, to see someone who has lost her children raise a second generation in poverty was a heart wrenching experience.
The Rooney’s set their lens on Petronella Makharya. While two of her charges are her grandchildren, the other two she adopted and nurtured back to health, learned Brenda one morning when she went to the South African woman’s shack to film. Makharya shows amazing courage, says Rooney, though she doesn’t know how she’ll survive the next month.
“She was told the baby would die but she nursed this baby who’s now this chubby, cute bundle. This woman has nothing, but she gets up every morning at 5:00 a.m..” Rooney fights back her tears as she describes Makharya’s situation. “This is what we’re supporting, this is what we wanted to capture with the filming.”
The film intends to show what a relationship between grandmothers on either side of the Atlantic can accomplish, whether it be fundraising for seeds to grow food, school fees and material to sew, or providing important emotional support through personal letter-writing.
“They need each other but they also need to feel there is help coming and the financial support allows them to feel that if a crisis happens there is somewhere to turn and there are people there to help,” says Rooney. “This acknowledgement we’re giving helps them recover and gives back to us. There’s no charity in this, we gain so much.”
With the help of an old friend from the anti-apartheid movement, the Rooneys safely navigated the impoverished Johannesburg suburb, which Brenda says is a very dangerous place, especially for people who don’t know it very well. They were also able to film with the help of a $6,000 grant from the Stephen Lewis Foundation, which funds grassroots projects attempting to aid the struggle against AIDS in Africa.
Since making their way home, the Rooneys cut over 30 hours of tape into an hour to show the 10 other Wakefield Grannies and their supporters what their partners go through every day, and present them each with a greeting from their counterpart.
“What we saw was some of the video they shot in Alexandra which sort of blew us away,” says Norma Geggie, who began the project with an invitation to her home in the fall of 2004. “The main thing was we were tickled pink to have this feedback because it’s more personal for us and we realize it has spread beyond Wakefield.”
The Stephen Lewis Foundation’s Grandmothers to Grandmothers movement, launched this March and now 45 granny groups strong, was inspired by the relationship between the Wakefield Grannies and Alexandra GoGos. The Great Grannie Revolution has an estimated budget of $100,000 and Rooney Productions is still looking for funding to ensure the documentary is ready to be shown at the foundation’s conference coming to Toronto in the days leading up to the World AIDS Conference this August. People can learn more at www.rooneyproductions.com.
Child psychologist Dr. Nina Minde from Montréal: Facing the impact of HIV/AIDS in South Africa
Canadian International Development Agency website
Canadians Making a Difference in the World
When Nina Minde accompanied her husband, Klaus, to South Africa on his university sabbatical, she “hoped I might be able to make myself useful, if I’m lucky.’’
Volunteering at a children’s mental health clinic in the township of Alexandra, Nina was shocked to discover the extent of the ravages of HIV/AIDS. More and more children attending the clinic were being brought by their grandmothers because their parents were dead or dying from AIDS.
According to UNAIDS, one out of five, or 5.3 million, South Africans is infected with HIV, the largest number of individuals living with the virus in a single country. More than half are women.
“Being a grandmother myself, I volunteered to run a support group with the clinic’s head nurse, Rose Letwaba,” says Nina. “Three grannies came to our first meeting. They told us their stories. We listened, and everybody cried a lot. The next week, two more grannies came. When there were ten, we couldn’t fit any more chairs into Rose’s office, so that was the group.”
The grannies told Nina and Rose they needed help in getting over the loss of their daughters and in raising their grandchildren to be ‘‘normal.’’ They called themselves the “Grannies of Sorrow” because instead of enjoying their senior years, they were struggling to raise children who were often sad and angry. Many of these women had also been plunged back into poverty.
“As we kept meeting, the women became more confident in their own abilities and more joyful,” says Nina. “They started to think about how to sustain themselves, and began to learn how to sew and garden. They blossomed. She adds, ‘‘It’s grown beyond our expectations.” Now able to speak publicly about their ordeals, the grannies have made it a priority to regularly talk to schoolchildren about HIV/AIDS prevention.
Today, the group has more than forty members. Through the Stephen Lewis Foundation, they have received funding for projects to increase their incomes and share the Granny Group concept. They have also received financial and moral support from three ‘‘sister’’ granny groups in Montréal and Wakefield, Que.; and Kamloops, B.C. And they have changed their name to the “Go-Go Grannies.”
Canadian International Development Agency website
Canadians Making a Difference in the World
When Nina Minde accompanied her husband, Klaus, to South Africa on his university sabbatical, she “hoped I might be able to make myself useful, if I’m lucky.’’
Volunteering at a children’s mental health clinic in the township of Alexandra, Nina was shocked to discover the extent of the ravages of HIV/AIDS. More and more children attending the clinic were being brought by their grandmothers because their parents were dead or dying from AIDS.
According to UNAIDS, one out of five, or 5.3 million, South Africans is infected with HIV, the largest number of individuals living with the virus in a single country. More than half are women.
“Being a grandmother myself, I volunteered to run a support group with the clinic’s head nurse, Rose Letwaba,” says Nina. “Three grannies came to our first meeting. They told us their stories. We listened, and everybody cried a lot. The next week, two more grannies came. When there were ten, we couldn’t fit any more chairs into Rose’s office, so that was the group.”
The grannies told Nina and Rose they needed help in getting over the loss of their daughters and in raising their grandchildren to be ‘‘normal.’’ They called themselves the “Grannies of Sorrow” because instead of enjoying their senior years, they were struggling to raise children who were often sad and angry. Many of these women had also been plunged back into poverty.
“As we kept meeting, the women became more confident in their own abilities and more joyful,” says Nina. “They started to think about how to sustain themselves, and began to learn how to sew and garden. They blossomed. She adds, ‘‘It’s grown beyond our expectations.” Now able to speak publicly about their ordeals, the grannies have made it a priority to regularly talk to schoolchildren about HIV/AIDS prevention.
Today, the group has more than forty members. Through the Stephen Lewis Foundation, they have received funding for projects to increase their incomes and share the Granny Group concept. They have also received financial and moral support from three ‘‘sister’’ granny groups in Montréal and Wakefield, Que.; and Kamloops, B.C. And they have changed their name to the “Go-Go Grannies.”
Rose Letwaba on "As it Happens"
broadcasted on CBC Radio in Spring 2006
AIDS has been ravaging families in South Africa for years. The disease has orphaned around seven hundred and fifty thousand children in the country. Often the task of caring for these children falls on ill, aging grandmothers – some of whom are also HIV-positive. Today, the Stephen Lewis Foundation launched "Grandmothers to Grandmothers" – a campaign to raise awareness and win support in Canada for Africa’s grandmothers.
Rose Letwaba is the head Psychiatric nurse at the Alex Tara Children’s Clinic in Johannesburg. She is also the founder of the Gogo Granny Outreach Project, a group providing emotional support for women looking after grandchildren orphaned by AIDS. She joined us earlier in our Toronto studio.
(minutes 16:47 to 27:20) Clip no longer available
broadcasted on CBC Radio in Spring 2006
AIDS has been ravaging families in South Africa for years. The disease has orphaned around seven hundred and fifty thousand children in the country. Often the task of caring for these children falls on ill, aging grandmothers – some of whom are also HIV-positive. Today, the Stephen Lewis Foundation launched "Grandmothers to Grandmothers" – a campaign to raise awareness and win support in Canada for Africa’s grandmothers.
Rose Letwaba is the head Psychiatric nurse at the Alex Tara Children’s Clinic in Johannesburg. She is also the founder of the Gogo Granny Outreach Project, a group providing emotional support for women looking after grandchildren orphaned by AIDS. She joined us earlier in our Toronto studio.
(minutes 16:47 to 27:20) Clip no longer available
African grandmothers care for kids orphaned by AIDS
Canada AM, CTV news
aired March 2006
They are overlooked members of society and unrecognized heroes. They are the millions of African grandmothers looking after their orphaned grandchildren with little money, little food and little help.
But while these women bear the enormous emotional burdens, few around the world do anything to respond to the orphan crisis. Some 14 million children have been orphaned by AIDS in Africa, and the number continues to rise. To put that into perspective, that is more than all the children in Canada, Ireland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark combined. Canadian Stephen Lewis, the United Nations’ special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, describes these grandmothers as the silent victims of the disease. "Every time I go back to Africa I see the carnage. I visit the huts where women are dying in the presence of their children," he says.
"What the Western world has so failed to do is to respond on an emergency basis to a huge human apocalypse. There’s no other way of describing it." The grandmothers, who Lewis says are "so impoverished and so frantic for support that they are emotionally decimated," often bury their sons and daughters and become mothers again to the children left behind, many of whom also suffer from HIV/AIDS. Lewis’ foundation brought one such grandmother from South Africa to Toronto this week to launch the Grandmothers to Grandmothers campaign.
Lucia Mazibuko, 52, lost two daughters to AIDS and was left to take care of two grandchildren, one of whom died from the pandemic. She told CTV’s Canada AM Wednesday losing your children is the toughest thing anyone can face. "They were my breadwinners. They were old enough to take care of me. So now they are gone, and I’m starting to struggle again to be a mother to their children." Mazibuko was accompanied by Rose Letwaba, a nurse in Mazibuko’s hometown who started a program called Gogo Granny Outreach. (Gogo means grandmother in Zulu).
The program offers counselling and helps grandmothers buy food, water and repair their rickety homes. "When I first met Lucia, I realized she’s human, she needs to talk about her losses. She needs someone to take her through the loss and the grief, and that’s why I started it. And it just makes so many other people aware that grandmothers are human beings as well. They’ve got feelings," Letwaba said. "Grannies are supposed to be enjoying their old age, having a cup of tea. But the situation is not like that anymore. Grandmothers are back to preparing lunch boxes, attending school meetings and doing all the house chores."
There are several groups in Canada that have started charities and raised money to help these African women. Sharon Maher, a 67-year-old great grandmother from Saskatoon, started Grandmothers 4 Grandmothers Fundraisers Inc. after hearing Lewis speak so passionately about the plight. "I started musing on what I would do if I were in the same situation, and it became absolutely part of my being that I had to do something," she said on Canada AM. "So along with a friend, Orla Lockerbie, we talked back and forth and looked at ways that we might be able to help. And finally, we just decided we had to get some like-minded women together and we would fundraise. That that was our sole purpose, that we would raise money to help these grandmothers in their extreme poverty and need." Maher said grandmothers are an "untapped resource."
"Most of my friends and my acquaintances are well enough off that we can certainly donate, and what we really needed is an easy vehicle or easy avenue to do that," she told CTV.ca. "Those women need more than a handout once in a while." Mazibuko said it warms her heart knowing there are women like Maher. "I’m so happy. Really, I’m so happy, and I just want to thank them and to thank Mr. Stephen Lewis because he’s the one who organized this."
While no figures exist on how many children have lost parents to AIDS, estimates suggest 18 to 20 million kids younger than 18 will be orphaned in Africa by 2010, with a high percentage of them due to AIDS.
In August, a Grandmothers’ Gathering event will be held in Toronto prior to the International AIDS Conference, bringing together grandmothers from Africa and Canada. The African women will speak about their lives in the context of AIDS and share their needs, and the Canadian grandmothers will discuss how they plan to respond to these needs.
For more information about the go to Stephen Lewis Grandmothers to Grandmothers program
Here is a list of six Canadian grandmothers’ groups:
For more information about the organizations, check out: Stephen Lewis Foundation
To get involved by connecting to an existing grandmothers group or starting your own group, contact: Shabnam Tashakour, 416-533-9292 ext 234; email: [email protected]
You can donate to the Stephen Lewis Foundation online. You can also donate by phone at 416-533-9292 or by mailing a donation to 260 Spadina Avenue, Suite 501, Toronto ON M5T 2E4, Canada.
Canada AM, CTV news
aired March 2006
They are overlooked members of society and unrecognized heroes. They are the millions of African grandmothers looking after their orphaned grandchildren with little money, little food and little help.
But while these women bear the enormous emotional burdens, few around the world do anything to respond to the orphan crisis. Some 14 million children have been orphaned by AIDS in Africa, and the number continues to rise. To put that into perspective, that is more than all the children in Canada, Ireland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark combined. Canadian Stephen Lewis, the United Nations’ special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, describes these grandmothers as the silent victims of the disease. "Every time I go back to Africa I see the carnage. I visit the huts where women are dying in the presence of their children," he says.
"What the Western world has so failed to do is to respond on an emergency basis to a huge human apocalypse. There’s no other way of describing it." The grandmothers, who Lewis says are "so impoverished and so frantic for support that they are emotionally decimated," often bury their sons and daughters and become mothers again to the children left behind, many of whom also suffer from HIV/AIDS. Lewis’ foundation brought one such grandmother from South Africa to Toronto this week to launch the Grandmothers to Grandmothers campaign.
Lucia Mazibuko, 52, lost two daughters to AIDS and was left to take care of two grandchildren, one of whom died from the pandemic. She told CTV’s Canada AM Wednesday losing your children is the toughest thing anyone can face. "They were my breadwinners. They were old enough to take care of me. So now they are gone, and I’m starting to struggle again to be a mother to their children." Mazibuko was accompanied by Rose Letwaba, a nurse in Mazibuko’s hometown who started a program called Gogo Granny Outreach. (Gogo means grandmother in Zulu).
The program offers counselling and helps grandmothers buy food, water and repair their rickety homes. "When I first met Lucia, I realized she’s human, she needs to talk about her losses. She needs someone to take her through the loss and the grief, and that’s why I started it. And it just makes so many other people aware that grandmothers are human beings as well. They’ve got feelings," Letwaba said. "Grannies are supposed to be enjoying their old age, having a cup of tea. But the situation is not like that anymore. Grandmothers are back to preparing lunch boxes, attending school meetings and doing all the house chores."
There are several groups in Canada that have started charities and raised money to help these African women. Sharon Maher, a 67-year-old great grandmother from Saskatoon, started Grandmothers 4 Grandmothers Fundraisers Inc. after hearing Lewis speak so passionately about the plight. "I started musing on what I would do if I were in the same situation, and it became absolutely part of my being that I had to do something," she said on Canada AM. "So along with a friend, Orla Lockerbie, we talked back and forth and looked at ways that we might be able to help. And finally, we just decided we had to get some like-minded women together and we would fundraise. That that was our sole purpose, that we would raise money to help these grandmothers in their extreme poverty and need." Maher said grandmothers are an "untapped resource."
"Most of my friends and my acquaintances are well enough off that we can certainly donate, and what we really needed is an easy vehicle or easy avenue to do that," she told CTV.ca. "Those women need more than a handout once in a while." Mazibuko said it warms her heart knowing there are women like Maher. "I’m so happy. Really, I’m so happy, and I just want to thank them and to thank Mr. Stephen Lewis because he’s the one who organized this."
While no figures exist on how many children have lost parents to AIDS, estimates suggest 18 to 20 million kids younger than 18 will be orphaned in Africa by 2010, with a high percentage of them due to AIDS.
In August, a Grandmothers’ Gathering event will be held in Toronto prior to the International AIDS Conference, bringing together grandmothers from Africa and Canada. The African women will speak about their lives in the context of AIDS and share their needs, and the Canadian grandmothers will discuss how they plan to respond to these needs.
For more information about the go to Stephen Lewis Grandmothers to Grandmothers program
Here is a list of six Canadian grandmothers’ groups:
- CanGo Grannies, based in Kamloops, British Columbia
- NanGo Grannies, based in Nanaimo, British Columbia
- Creston Go Go Grannies, based in Creston, British Columbia
- CanDo Grannies, Squamish Pod, based in Squamish, British Columbia
- Grandmothers 4 Grandmothers Fundraisers Inc., based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
- The Wakefield Grannies, based in Wakefield, Quebec
For more information about the organizations, check out: Stephen Lewis Foundation
To get involved by connecting to an existing grandmothers group or starting your own group, contact: Shabnam Tashakour, 416-533-9292 ext 234; email: [email protected]
You can donate to the Stephen Lewis Foundation online. You can also donate by phone at 416-533-9292 or by mailing a donation to 260 Spadina Avenue, Suite 501, Toronto ON M5T 2E4, Canada.
Grannies reach out to Africa
By Jessica Wilson
published in the Ottawa Citizen, March, 2006
Wakefield grandmothers are helping African women who have lost children to AIDS and are now raising grandchildren.
Marilee Rhody’s eyes well up with tears when she speaks about the struggles of a grandmother who’s raising AIDS-orphaned grand-children in South Africa. “It’s the women who often bear the brunt of Africa’s burden, and this is no exception” the Wakefield women and fellow grandmother said yesterday “ I have the utmost respect for them.” Mrs. Rhody is speaking of Maria, the grandmother Mrs. Rhody has been assigned to support through a program she and 10 other Wakefield women began last fall.
After Rose Letwaba, who works as a nurse with the Alexandra Grannies in a town just outside of Johannesburg, came to speak to them last October, the group of women now known as the Wakefield Grannies decided they had to do something to help. Ms. Letwaba spoke of the 40 grandmothers she works with in South Africa and how they felt alone and cur off, in the tragic position of filling in for the lost generation and trying to rebuild their grandchildren’s lives. “ As UN special envoy) Stephen Lewis said, really, these children become orphans when their parents get sick,” said Brenda Rooney, a Wakefield Granny who made the documentary Condoms, Fish and Circus Tricks about AIDS in Africa. She said the children often find themselves looking after their sick parents, starving themselves so their mother or father can eat, trying desperately to prolong their lives.
“Then the grandparents have to step in,” said Mrs. Rooney. “Imagine - to lose your own kids and then to have to raise your grandchildren, at this time in their lives. And the kids are really angry. Maria, said Mrs. Rhody, has cared for her two grandchildren, 9 and 11, since their mother’s - Maria’s daughter- died of AIDS. Before the Wakefield Grannies stepped in to help, Maria’s grandchildren didn’t have shoes. The Wakefield Grannies have held two successful fundraisers for the Alexandra Grannies, also known as Alex GoGos, and thanks to that, the children now have shoes.
Yesterday's fundraising concert was held at the Wakefield covered bridge, and for $10 each, about 200 people got to spend the afternoon listening to music, hearing poetry, learning about the Alex GoGos and knowing that all the proceeds from refreshment and tickets sales were going to help these women and their grandchildren. The concert featured the Akpoki Drum and Dance Society, the duo John Geggie, a double bass player and vocalist and guitarist Terry Tuft, and the Castenchel Choir. Granny Linda Gorka estimated they raised about $3,000 which she said was “amazing” and would go a long way for the Alex GoGos. “What’s really unique about the Wakefield Grannies is that we have enough respect for these women to not tell them how to spend the money” said Mrs. Rooney. “It’s their money”. Besides sending money, each grandmother is paired with a South African counterpart as a sort of pen pal, sending letters and pictures and whatever they like, a link to the outside world and the comfort of knowing that people half a world away know and care.
“The most important thing is encouragement and support., women to women,” said Mrs. Rhody. They don’t have to feel so isolated anymore.”
By Jessica Wilson
published in the Ottawa Citizen, March, 2006
Wakefield grandmothers are helping African women who have lost children to AIDS and are now raising grandchildren.
Marilee Rhody’s eyes well up with tears when she speaks about the struggles of a grandmother who’s raising AIDS-orphaned grand-children in South Africa. “It’s the women who often bear the brunt of Africa’s burden, and this is no exception” the Wakefield women and fellow grandmother said yesterday “ I have the utmost respect for them.” Mrs. Rhody is speaking of Maria, the grandmother Mrs. Rhody has been assigned to support through a program she and 10 other Wakefield women began last fall.
After Rose Letwaba, who works as a nurse with the Alexandra Grannies in a town just outside of Johannesburg, came to speak to them last October, the group of women now known as the Wakefield Grannies decided they had to do something to help. Ms. Letwaba spoke of the 40 grandmothers she works with in South Africa and how they felt alone and cur off, in the tragic position of filling in for the lost generation and trying to rebuild their grandchildren’s lives. “ As UN special envoy) Stephen Lewis said, really, these children become orphans when their parents get sick,” said Brenda Rooney, a Wakefield Granny who made the documentary Condoms, Fish and Circus Tricks about AIDS in Africa. She said the children often find themselves looking after their sick parents, starving themselves so their mother or father can eat, trying desperately to prolong their lives.
“Then the grandparents have to step in,” said Mrs. Rooney. “Imagine - to lose your own kids and then to have to raise your grandchildren, at this time in their lives. And the kids are really angry. Maria, said Mrs. Rhody, has cared for her two grandchildren, 9 and 11, since their mother’s - Maria’s daughter- died of AIDS. Before the Wakefield Grannies stepped in to help, Maria’s grandchildren didn’t have shoes. The Wakefield Grannies have held two successful fundraisers for the Alexandra Grannies, also known as Alex GoGos, and thanks to that, the children now have shoes.
Yesterday's fundraising concert was held at the Wakefield covered bridge, and for $10 each, about 200 people got to spend the afternoon listening to music, hearing poetry, learning about the Alex GoGos and knowing that all the proceeds from refreshment and tickets sales were going to help these women and their grandchildren. The concert featured the Akpoki Drum and Dance Society, the duo John Geggie, a double bass player and vocalist and guitarist Terry Tuft, and the Castenchel Choir. Granny Linda Gorka estimated they raised about $3,000 which she said was “amazing” and would go a long way for the Alex GoGos. “What’s really unique about the Wakefield Grannies is that we have enough respect for these women to not tell them how to spend the money” said Mrs. Rooney. “It’s their money”. Besides sending money, each grandmother is paired with a South African counterpart as a sort of pen pal, sending letters and pictures and whatever they like, a link to the outside world and the comfort of knowing that people half a world away know and care.
“The most important thing is encouragement and support., women to women,” said Mrs. Rhody. They don’t have to feel so isolated anymore.”
2005
Tales of bitter loss and new hope
By Stephanie Nolen
published in The Globe & Mail, December 2005
JOHANNESBURG — This is my favourite story about Mpho. Her granny, Magdalene, who has raised her since her mother died of AIDS when Mpho was only 2, belongs to a support group for grannies raising orphans in the township of Alexandra in Johannesburg. That support group gives the grannies a little something each month — a food parcel or maybe a bit of money to spend on drugs or nutritious food. One day a year ago, Magdalene was too sick to go to the meeting, and she sent Mpho to collect the monthly donation. That day, it was 100 rand — about $20.
And Mpho picked it up — but on the way home, she took a detour to a little shop. She spent the whole thing — a small fortune for a child in Alexandra — on candy. And then she went to her school, and gave sweets to everyone. And for one day, she was the most popular girl in school. Magdalene was furious, of course — but everybody had to laugh a little at Mpho’s determined extravagance.
I was going to tell you many more things about Mpho. My editors and I had plans for me to write regularly, beginning this week, about her and her family, as a way of helping Globe readers to understand what AIDS is doing to Africa. We were going to follow Mpho, her grandmother Magdalene and her aunt Ellen — all of them living with HIV — as they struggled to get treatment and keep their family together in a community with one of the highest AIDS-infection rates in the world.
My editor wondered whether they were the right family for this kind of project, because the disease has already cost them so much. But I argued that they were — because at this point there are so few families unscathed, so many already struggling in all these ways.
And because, as I have come to know them over the past three years, I have been so taken with their scrappy courage, with Mpho tottering to school on stick-thin legs because she didn’t want to miss anything: they were good people for you to get to know, I thought. But they were gone, before I could get even one word written down.
Mpho died last month, at the age of 12. Before she got to be in her school Christmas pageant, before she got to have a boyfriend. She died after fighting HIV for all of her 12 years.
The call came on a Friday night — my friend Rosina, an extraordinarily brave nurse who runs the support group and through whom I first met this family, called to say that Mpho had died. And that her aunt Ellen was taken to a hospice for palliative care, at this point too sick to stand.
A week later, we went to the funeral in Alexandra. Granny Magdalene — who buried her daughter, and now a granddaughter, and saw another funeral coming soon — looked at us and said simply: "I’m lost. I’m lost." Mpho’s brother Paul, 14, and with just one last close relative left alive, scuffed among the crowds, not meeting anybody’s eyes, but much too brave to cry. At the Alexandra graveyard, there was a crisis: There is no space left, not space for the coffin of even a frail and wasted 12-year-old.
In the end, they reopened the grave of Mpho’s mother, dug down deeper and buried her daughter on top. The night before the funeral, a huge storm swept through the township, and very nearly collapsed the plastic tent where the neighbour ladies and family friends were chopping vegetables for the community feast that accompanies a funeral here.
Rosina gave a bittersweet laugh: "That’s Mpho," she said, about the tearing wind. "She’s so angry."
I’m angry too. I feel a white liquid rage at South Africa’s government, which continues to drag its feet and prevaricate about AIDS treatment. Mpho was on anti-retroviral drugs, but she got them only six months ago — when she had long, long lived past the expected life span of a child born with HIV, when all of her internal organs were already irreparably damaged by the virus. There is no good reason at all why she should not have had the drugs three or four years ago, but for the inexplicable, stubborn stalling of South Africa’s President, Thabo Mbeki, and particularly his Minister of Health, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang.
And I’m furious at the way Mpho had to live and die. If Mpho and her family didn’t live in such squalor, without access to jobs or good health care or nutritious food, she might have been far healthier.
If the adults in her life — particularly the male sexual partners of her mother, aunts and granny — had practised safer sex, she would have had better people to care for her, or perhaps never been infected at all.
I’m furious that AIDS in Africa still attracts so pathetically little international attention, such paltry help. Where is the international rescue effort that should be going on in a community such as Alexandra, where we know one in three people will die in a couple of years unless there is a massive effort to assist? There are a couple of billboards, one clinic giving drugs. That’s it.
And I’m bitterly angry with myself. I meet dozens of people in the last days of their lives each week in this job, and I keep a tough layer of callus between me and the world. But Mpho got underneath it — and I am enraged that I did not, could not, do more to keep her alive.
In truth, I did not think she could die, although Rosina — wise Rosina, who works all day at the coalface of the pandemic — told me quietly, as we made pumpkin pies for Thanksgiving dinner, that the end was coming quickly for Mpho.
Nonsense, I said: Mpho is on ARVs. I wouldn’t let myself believe that anyone who had access to treatment could die: I meet so very many people who are sick that, if I am to function here at all, I need to believe that treatment, if somehow they can just get access to treatment, will keep them alive.
At Mpho’s funeral, I joined the stout, weary grannies who washed the dishes in tubs in the yard, and helped in the line of women who dished out mashed pumpkin and beetroot. Every third or fourth face I looked into — the children from Mpho’s class, the neighbours — bore the signs of HIV. I have persuaded myself of the miracle of anti-retroviral treatment, though of course it does not always work and it only forestalls the inevitable, because to believe otherwise is to know that all of these people will imminently be gone too.
Mpho deserved that forestalling and so much more. And I think what makes me most angry is the loss: she was a crafty, clever, sharp, sparkly kid. Now she’s one more AIDS statistic for Africa: but had she lived, she might have been so many things. All of that, all of what she might have done for her fractured family and her desperate community and her hemorrhaging country — all of that is lost.
Maybe she would have been a doctor, or a teacher — and maybe she would just have been a kid who got a boyfriend and tussled with him in the township streets.
We will never know what we’ve lost.
By Stephanie Nolen
published in The Globe & Mail, December 2005
JOHANNESBURG — This is my favourite story about Mpho. Her granny, Magdalene, who has raised her since her mother died of AIDS when Mpho was only 2, belongs to a support group for grannies raising orphans in the township of Alexandra in Johannesburg. That support group gives the grannies a little something each month — a food parcel or maybe a bit of money to spend on drugs or nutritious food. One day a year ago, Magdalene was too sick to go to the meeting, and she sent Mpho to collect the monthly donation. That day, it was 100 rand — about $20.
And Mpho picked it up — but on the way home, she took a detour to a little shop. She spent the whole thing — a small fortune for a child in Alexandra — on candy. And then she went to her school, and gave sweets to everyone. And for one day, she was the most popular girl in school. Magdalene was furious, of course — but everybody had to laugh a little at Mpho’s determined extravagance.
I was going to tell you many more things about Mpho. My editors and I had plans for me to write regularly, beginning this week, about her and her family, as a way of helping Globe readers to understand what AIDS is doing to Africa. We were going to follow Mpho, her grandmother Magdalene and her aunt Ellen — all of them living with HIV — as they struggled to get treatment and keep their family together in a community with one of the highest AIDS-infection rates in the world.
My editor wondered whether they were the right family for this kind of project, because the disease has already cost them so much. But I argued that they were — because at this point there are so few families unscathed, so many already struggling in all these ways.
And because, as I have come to know them over the past three years, I have been so taken with their scrappy courage, with Mpho tottering to school on stick-thin legs because she didn’t want to miss anything: they were good people for you to get to know, I thought. But they were gone, before I could get even one word written down.
Mpho died last month, at the age of 12. Before she got to be in her school Christmas pageant, before she got to have a boyfriend. She died after fighting HIV for all of her 12 years.
The call came on a Friday night — my friend Rosina, an extraordinarily brave nurse who runs the support group and through whom I first met this family, called to say that Mpho had died. And that her aunt Ellen was taken to a hospice for palliative care, at this point too sick to stand.
A week later, we went to the funeral in Alexandra. Granny Magdalene — who buried her daughter, and now a granddaughter, and saw another funeral coming soon — looked at us and said simply: "I’m lost. I’m lost." Mpho’s brother Paul, 14, and with just one last close relative left alive, scuffed among the crowds, not meeting anybody’s eyes, but much too brave to cry. At the Alexandra graveyard, there was a crisis: There is no space left, not space for the coffin of even a frail and wasted 12-year-old.
In the end, they reopened the grave of Mpho’s mother, dug down deeper and buried her daughter on top. The night before the funeral, a huge storm swept through the township, and very nearly collapsed the plastic tent where the neighbour ladies and family friends were chopping vegetables for the community feast that accompanies a funeral here.
Rosina gave a bittersweet laugh: "That’s Mpho," she said, about the tearing wind. "She’s so angry."
I’m angry too. I feel a white liquid rage at South Africa’s government, which continues to drag its feet and prevaricate about AIDS treatment. Mpho was on anti-retroviral drugs, but she got them only six months ago — when she had long, long lived past the expected life span of a child born with HIV, when all of her internal organs were already irreparably damaged by the virus. There is no good reason at all why she should not have had the drugs three or four years ago, but for the inexplicable, stubborn stalling of South Africa’s President, Thabo Mbeki, and particularly his Minister of Health, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang.
And I’m furious at the way Mpho had to live and die. If Mpho and her family didn’t live in such squalor, without access to jobs or good health care or nutritious food, she might have been far healthier.
If the adults in her life — particularly the male sexual partners of her mother, aunts and granny — had practised safer sex, she would have had better people to care for her, or perhaps never been infected at all.
I’m furious that AIDS in Africa still attracts so pathetically little international attention, such paltry help. Where is the international rescue effort that should be going on in a community such as Alexandra, where we know one in three people will die in a couple of years unless there is a massive effort to assist? There are a couple of billboards, one clinic giving drugs. That’s it.
And I’m bitterly angry with myself. I meet dozens of people in the last days of their lives each week in this job, and I keep a tough layer of callus between me and the world. But Mpho got underneath it — and I am enraged that I did not, could not, do more to keep her alive.
In truth, I did not think she could die, although Rosina — wise Rosina, who works all day at the coalface of the pandemic — told me quietly, as we made pumpkin pies for Thanksgiving dinner, that the end was coming quickly for Mpho.
Nonsense, I said: Mpho is on ARVs. I wouldn’t let myself believe that anyone who had access to treatment could die: I meet so very many people who are sick that, if I am to function here at all, I need to believe that treatment, if somehow they can just get access to treatment, will keep them alive.
At Mpho’s funeral, I joined the stout, weary grannies who washed the dishes in tubs in the yard, and helped in the line of women who dished out mashed pumpkin and beetroot. Every third or fourth face I looked into — the children from Mpho’s class, the neighbours — bore the signs of HIV. I have persuaded myself of the miracle of anti-retroviral treatment, though of course it does not always work and it only forestalls the inevitable, because to believe otherwise is to know that all of these people will imminently be gone too.
Mpho deserved that forestalling and so much more. And I think what makes me most angry is the loss: she was a crafty, clever, sharp, sparkly kid. Now she’s one more AIDS statistic for Africa: but had she lived, she might have been so many things. All of that, all of what she might have done for her fractured family and her desperate community and her hemorrhaging country — all of that is lost.
Maybe she would have been a doctor, or a teacher — and maybe she would just have been a kid who got a boyfriend and tussled with him in the township streets.
We will never know what we’ve lost.