Stories have an incredible power that no cold, hard statistics can replace. And when a storyteller has Zodwa Hilda Ndlovu’s quiet strength, it’s impossible not to be moved almost to tears.
Yet Ndlovu would rather move people to action because she and the other grandmothers of sub-Saharan Africa need help.
Ndlovu is 62 and a retired nurse.
Her daughter died in 2000. She was 25 and a single mother. She’d just graduated from university and was teaching school for the first year in a community near Durban, South Africa.
Because her daughter had not been well, Ndlovu quit her nursing job in 1999 to look after both her daughter and granddaughter.
In 2000, Ndlovu’s daughter was so sick that she was admitted to hospital where she was finally diagnosed with AIDs. There was no treatment then.
The diagnosis was too late for Ndlovu, too. She had become infected while nursing her daughter.
But Ndlovu is healthy today because of anti-retroviral drugs that since 2004 have been provided free by the South African government.
A year after her daughter died, Ndlovu was driving by her 21-year-old son’s house. He’d just finished his training as an electrical engineer.
“His house was burning. I saw it from the car. I couldn’t understand what was happening,” she told me when we spoke on Friday.
Daphne Bramham
Vancouver Sun
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