Adapting for hope - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 35: Surviving
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Doug Hendrie
SISTER ETHEL IS an outsider. She is Irish. She is also white - so how has she become accepted? ‘When I started out I did not have anything. I do not know if you were shown where I began? It is important for you to see the tree,' she says, holding my gaze. For Sister Ethel, the tree is an essential component of her story. She was given something - the shade of a tree - so that she might begin giving herself. The tree is consent. To accept help is difficult and even more so from a stranger. Imagine then a white foreigner, under apartheid. So the tree is what enabled a quarter of a century of work spent building, building, building, in a place where no one builds things which last.
But: to take without giving yourself leads to dependency, complaints and demands. To ensure she has consent, Sister Ethel asks something of people. If you are one of the hundreds of people who depend on the care centre for food you must bring a bag of rubbish as payment, every day. And before she set about gathering funds and labour and material for the church, Sister Ethel asked for contributions from a small group. As the hat passed by, each person dipped into their small stores of coins, pooling 13 rand (about $2). People brought in pieces of broken glass to be melted down and reformed into the cross atop the church. South Africa was not part of the early life plan for a young Tipperary woman. ‘When I was growing up, I was very focused on getting married and having children,' she says in her soft brogue. But she felt a certain calling and decided to enter the convent for a six week trial run. Six years later, she was still there and about to be sent to South Africa. ‘I would say it is God's grace - something I cannot put into words - that led me and kept me where I am,' she says. ‘If I had my life all over again, I would not have chosen anything else. I find I have a tremendous amount of joy. The joy gives me happiness and the happiness gives me joy.'
Sister Ethel was the last of her order - the Little Company of Mary - to be sent overseas without a choice. Later nuns could say no.
‘I am very much a home person, and my family are very important to me,' she says. ‘Twelve young girls entered with me and they all said they wouldn't mind going to Africa, but I was the one who said, Oh, I will do anything in Ireland,' she says, stressing anything. ‘I didn't want to be away from my family. But I was the one who was sent.' In 1972, she felt the weight of the African sun for the first time. ‘It just broke my heart to leave home. But at that time, you were told to go,' she says. Acutely homesick, Sister Ethel threw herself into her work. The plight of the black poor was obvious immediately, and for the next fifteen years, she used her training as a nurse to tend to the poor in two outstations. There was poverty there, but nothing like Missionvale.
‘In 1985, a time came in my life where I could say to myself, If I don't go, they will never own the project and what we built up. As I explained it to them, you walk at my pace now, but you have the ability to fly.' Sister Ethel felt the pull of Ireland as well, and she returned home, but it wasn't long before her superior asked her to return to Port Elizabeth, where the need had not diminished In 1988, she ventured into Missionvale and found a tree to tether herself to. ‘When people found me down by the tree, I was a nurse who came to visit,' she says ‘But I was also into education, and I feel it is only education that will change this whole scenario around. So I taught kids in the morning, and nursed people in the afternoon. I remember one girl - she was beautiful. I will always remember her eyes. The first day, she literally slipped her hand into mine. I taught her to write her name, and then I wrote under it, I am beautiful. That was a wonderful day. Anyway, she later gave birth to three children, and she has died, you know, of AIDS, and two of the children have too. But still, she is a very special person in my life.' A sadness plays around her eyes, and for the first time I see the bone weariness that has come of so many years here, in this dusty spot with forgotten people.
THIS IS A story of how a young Irish woman found herself tending to South Africa's poor. But that makes it sound too simple. Look at the complications. Near the tree is a wide stretch of open grassed land - rare, for this densely populated shack-land. It exists because soon after Sister Ethel arrived, so did HIV. By the early 1990s people were dying near where she first began teaching and nursing. It is cursed land, afflicted by the then-unknown wasting disease.
Even now the land is untouched. When the Missionvale Care Centre was built, it had to be a kilometre from its founding place of myth, to avoid the stigma of the land. For this is what must be done - adaptation. You cannot simply tell someone that there is no connection between the work of Sister Ethel and AIDS. You must slow yourself, ready yourself for a different mental architecture. How could it be coincidence that a white stranger arrives and then this virus, so close together? As the years went by and AIDS spread from the first few infected near the tree across the whole settlement, suspicion of Sister Ethel eased. But the land is still bare.
I HAVE COME late to this place. The graveyards are full, and new splinter graveyards are emerging. Three years ago the hill behind Missionvale was bare, rocky and arid, but now, with the settlement in the grip of this stealth virus, the hill has been planted with bodies - dozens each weekend. Hundreds upon hundreds of graves dot the hill, wind-blown plastic bags tugging on wooden slat crosses. Who survives this pandemic? Half of all pregnant women have HIV, and so children are born already half-dead. Tuberculosis is widespread, too - carrying off those weakened by HIV. It is those too young or old for sex who survive. A family in the age of AIDS is grandparents looking after their children's children. When the grandparent dies the oldest child steps up, cradling siblings, eking out a living. What can be done? The Vatican still holds out on condom use, but the Vatican is a long way away. ‘We preach abstinence, but you have to be practical as well,' says Sister Ethel, quietly. ‘I am very direct and I ask very personal questions,' she says, fixing me with bright eyes. ‘With every man that comes to me, I would ask them, Are you living with somebody? Is that the only person in your life? Or do you have multiple partners? They have great trust in me and that is wonderful. I do not take that for granted. Then, I would say, Okay, you know what AIDS is?' She pauses, remembering countless stories. ‘They would say, Sister, how could you think I have AIDS? I would say, Well, maybe you have or maybe not. What about having a test? I know they resent this and I say, If you resent it, you commit to me to come again. I would ask for a commitment between them so that they would have sex only with their partner and with the commitment of a condom, you know. They say Yes to me and I have to believe that they do. I have not yet found that any man that have said he will come back have not come back.'
With the women, Sister Ethel asks, is your man faithful to you? If not, she delivers a firm warning: ‘If he demands sex when he comes back, you make sure he wears a condom. This is a life and death situation.' Often, it is too late and the woman already has the virus. ‘I must provide for them and take care of the illnesses they have. That could be pneumonia, TB, skin diseases. But I say to them that they must have time for themselves. In their home, there is no way to have privacy. But at church - they can have that time with God, to keep the spirit going.'
After years of witnessing domestic violence, abuse and a culture of male domination, Sister Ethel is tired of dancing around words. ‘It is very much the culture of men - the more children I father, the more of a man I am. What really upsets me is when the man does nothing to bring food in, yet he is the first person to be fed.' Her voice tightens. ‘I must say, I love men and I can't do without them and a lot of men have helped me, but there are sometimes I just do not want to see another man because what they have done to the women. I see those hungry children and those hungry women and I see how hard that woman has struggled to provide and the man demanding the food. Many women are beaten because they cannot provide what he wants. Women are blamed for giving their husband AIDS, when he has been the culprit 99 per cent of the time,' she says bluntly.
What this means is that efforts to change sexual behaviour face a near-impermeable cultural wall. HIV is now a permanent epidemic in Missionvale, as in most of South Africa. But here, as in many countries, anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs have been rolled out. The drug cocktail takes a toll on the body, like chemotherapy. But they can contain HIV, prevent it from utterly destroying the immune system, and indefinitely stave off the AIDS death from small infections. The new tragedy of Missionvale is that you can only qualify for ARV drugs when you are nearly dead. So you flirt with death to earn money from the state, and to get your life-prolonging drugs. And so people play the game, wait until they sicken, waste towards death and then, they hope, the money comes, the drugs come, life comes surging back. But often, very often, death comes instead.
I ask how she can stay optimistic in such a place. Sister Ethel's method is to mix pragmatism with spiritual idealism, nurse with believer. ‘While people are alive, I try to give them a life so that they can die well. If they do not experience love and care when they are nursed, it is very hard for them to believe there is a better place for them when they die,' she says. ‘But what I see as the bottom line is dignity and respect for the people and making people aware that all of us have dignity, and poverty does not diminish that.'
At the church service on a Sunday in January, Missionvale's Xhosa and coloured burst into song. Sister Ethel sways to the African songs but doesn't sing. She grins and watches her flock. As the mass reaches its climax, a mammoth black woman stands, brushing off her belly. She strides into the aisle and sets herself shaking, her entire body wriggling, pulsing, convulsing. The crowd pours into the aisles. They cascade to the front of the church, surrounding the baffled Irish volunteers, who whip out cameras, the modern coping mechanism. The women lead the way, the strong ones. A two-year-old dances with her mother, taking her first rhythmic steps. After the final shake and chorus, the visiting Irish priest goes outside, clearly wondering what happened to him. ‘That was great,' he says, half-dazed. ‘We have to have another one like that.'
Afterwards, in her office, Sister Ethel says it plainly: ‘You have to adapt.' Bending and accommodating makes dignity possible. Sister Muriel pokes her head around the corner, and Sister Ethel perks up. Making her farewell, she returns to her people. Muriel watches her fondly. ‘She never stops looking after us all. You can tell she cares a lot for others because she doesn't take care of herself. She values us more and more. If she goes home in the evening, she doesn't sit down. She prays for those who have lost loved ones. She writes thank you letters. She phones parents. She makes Christmas gifts. That's what she does. All the time.'