The children

The life cycle

© UNICEF SA Photo by A Berther

Children from an informal settlement in Zululand play and sing outside their crèche.

What’s life like for the majority of children in South Africa, a country where half the population is under 15 years old? Great strides have been taken towards the improvements in the lives of children, for example by September 2007, over 8 million children had been lifted out of poverty by the Child Support Grant. In the poorest of rural and peri-urban communities, informal settlements and townships where UNICEF conducts its work, life is no picnic for children, adolescents and young people. Poverty, HIV/AIDS and unemployment have combined to take a devastating toll on families, weakening traditional, social and extended family support systems and leaving children and young people to bear a huge part of the burden of caring for families.

In a tiny hillside village dotted with broken rondavels scattered about the rolling green Zululand hills, the ten-member Mkhize* family lives in a leaky two-room house made of mud, cement and straw. The father of the household, Sizwe, built this house with his own two hands for his beloved wife Lindi and their children Dumi 14, Bongani 12, Zoli 13 and Zandile 4, after heavy rains washed away their modest one-room thatch roof house.   But that was six years ago, when he was a strong mine worker, up and about his daily routines.  That was before he was diagnosed as HIV+.  Now, even as the family lovingly cares for him, they are entirely dependent on the Lindi's seasonal income from a nearby fruit farm, where she plants and picks fruit in the harvest time.

One rainy night, Lindi's pregnant sister Maria fled to the Mkhize household following another bout of violence from her husband, who brought a new wife into their home.  His abusive behaviour displaced Maria and the couple's three children, Moxie 10, Nthlanthla 12 and Patience 6, and only heightened the stress in the already crowded Mkhize house, where water seeped though the ceiling caulked only by bits and pieces of the children's pink bubble gum.  

Since Maria gave birth to HIV+ Lerato, now 2, she has made every attempt to get anti-retroviral treatment. Both are frequently sick; sometimes Maria is too weak herself to walk to the village to catch the transport to the clinic some 25 kilometres away.  Social services are almost non- existent in her small community, there is no running water or sanitation facilities. With so many other women in the community being HIV+, everyone has high hopes that a mobile clinic will come their way soon.

Sometimes, community health workers do come around but not often enough. The family worries constantly about the state of health of Sizwe, now a mere shell of his former self, Maria, and little Lorato, who has been improving with the anti-retroviral care, are trying to maintain good nutrition with the little food they have. The Mkhize children started a little kitchen garden of maize, tomatoes and pumpkins with some seed money from a UNICEF programme, but there is still never enough food and hunger and survival are daily concerns of everyone in this family.

Even though education is free, Mogano, Nthlanthla, Zoli and Moxie struggle to stay in school. They are hungry most days and their mom has no money to buy uniforms.  Other children tease them because of their tattered clothing. Once, Bongani, who looks older than his 12 years, ran away from home and made his way to Durban "to get work", he said, to help support his impoverished mother and siblings.  But his efforts landed him in jail with a group of street children with whom he sought shelter, and instead, ended up harassing motorists at traffic lights and selling drugs on the mean streets of the city.  The police put him on a bus for home when they discovered his young age and his "country ways" and an older woman on the bus helped steer him back to his village and family. Disillusioned, he hardly ever goes out, says his mom, not even to school for that matter.

The youth-friendly centre nearby provides some much-needed pshycosocial-support in the form of a welcome-meal, an escape from the dire conditions at home. His cousins Nthlanthla and Dumi, who are always first to show up at the Centre’s huge iron gate every afternoon, sometimes drag him along with them to play basketball or computer games or to try out his big dream to be a radio DJ in the community radio station.  The youth centre, a model of youth-driven initiatives to prevent HIV and AIDS is working with UNICEF to develop its peer counseling and life skills training programmes to keep young people meaningfully engaged, protected and well informed about HIV and AIDS.

At 13, Zoli is a model student, but the principal of her school is worried because lately Zoli, who walks a good 5 kilometres to school and back every day, has not been showing up regularly.  She knows that girls’ are especially vulnerable in this community; every day she sees the impact of HIV and AIDS on her school population. She knows that half the new infections occur between the ages of 15-24 years, and in the entire country, over one million children have lost both parents to AIDS.

© UNICEF SA Photo by G Pirozzi

Many school age girls, like Zoli, have domestic responsibilities at home.

With so many mouths to feed, Zoli - like many girls in her community - has loads of domestic responsibility, from fetching water to helping with the cooking and cleaning for the whole family. The distance she walks to school is long and can be dangerous -- girls have been attacked and raped while walking to and from school on dark winter mornings.  A few of them have become pregnant in their early teens.  Sometimes, Zoli takes off from school for weeks at a time to join the seasonal fruit pickers to earn a few extra rands to boost the family's meagre income and to buy herself the uniform that will keep the prying eyes of the other students off her body and earn her a little respite from the stigma and discrimination she experiences when she wears her own unfashionable, worn-out garments to school. The Principal has high hopes for Zoli and keeps a watchful and protective eye out for her.  She has personally intervened to provide Zoli with food parcels and a uniform to help keep her in school.

But hope is coming alive again for the Mkhize family. The other day, a community volunteer came by to teach them how to apply for life-supporting social grants. Both Sizwe and Maria are eligible for a R700 a month disability grant that can put food on the table and bring medical aid to sick members of the family.  Bongani and the youth worker helped his mom and uncle fill out the form for the grant.  Although several months later, they have not received any payments, the community volunteer is helping with the follow-up to make sure the payouts start soon.

* To protect the privacy of individuals all the names and locations have changed

Rapid Assessment on the situation of children in South Africa
Children's Institute, University of Cape Town and Save the Children, November 2003
[PDF]
(PDF documents require Acrobat Reader to view.)

Government of South Africa National Census, 2001
[Web link]