Zanele Mchunu And The Leaders Of Tomorrow

The Centre for HIV/AIDS Networking (HIVAN) is working with a group of 31 young people from the Magangangozi community of Okhahlamba who have lost either one or both of their parents and who have named their group “The Okhahlamba Leaders of Tomorrow”.

Living in this area of rolling hills near to the Drakensberg Mountains in KwaZulu-Natal, they are vibrant, independent youngsters who perform many tasks necessary to rural life: herding cattle, ploughing, harvesting thatch-grass, fishing, walking long distances to collect water and wood, to haul purchases from the nearest town, Bergville, or to attend school. They live in varied circumstances, ranging from large extended families (that seem to be coping with poverty and illness by maintaining close bonds), to families with few resources and little emotional support.

For some years, a young woman named Zanele Mchunu has been involved in an intervention project with the Leaders of Tomorrow (LOT) to raise chickens and cultivate a communal garden. As part of her ongoing research, she is compiling a short history of the project, visiting the young people in their homesteads and recording how they have dealt with their problems. This work has given her an in-depth understanding of their needs, hopes, weaknesses and strengths, and her knowledge is being developed gradually into intervention plans that are specially adapted to the community’s requirements.

The Leaders of Tomorrow research study began when Dr Patti Henderson, HIVAN’s senior researcher in Okhahlamba, accompanied Zanele to their school once a week. There, Patti facilitated and developed theatre games and improvisations around the children’s daily lives.

In December 2003, the LOT team travelled to the South Coast of KwaZulu-Natal for a week-long workshop to produce a play, Umdlalo Wethu. The workshop deepened the relationship between researchers and the youth, and provided a free space in which they could create images of their lives, including the presence of HIV/AIDS, in ways that reflected unpleasant realities yet were healing and uplifting.

This is Zanele’s personal story:

I was born in a mountainous rural area known as Okhahlamba in KwaZulu-Natal, and completed by secondary schooling at Amangwane High School, but as my mother was widowed, I had no funds for tertiary education.

I started work with the WorldVision organisation as a sexuality education motivator, being one of a team of six giving life-skills and HIV/AIDS education classes in the primary and high schools of Okhahlamba. During my second year of teaching, I observed the deaths of several family members of my neighbour, one after the other, until four children were left in a yard without parents or guardians. The oldest child was thirteen years old. I remember that the last family member passed away on my pay-day, and my mother asked me to contribute some of our groceries to the funeral.

We supported my neighbour’s orphaned children until they could be taken in by their extended families. They never enjoyed their full rights as children, as none of them completed their primary school education – and that left pain in my heart, because even though I came from a poor family, my mother managed to raise me in love and so met many of my needs as a child. So, I tried to find out how to help children like these.

Once my initial work contract ended, I was re-employed by WorldVision, under a Micro-Enterprise Development grant, as Co-ordinator of one of its three programmes, the orphan project, which was funded for three years. In 2003, HIVAN formed a research partnership with WorldVision focusing on vulnerable children and home-based care in the area. As a result, I am now employed by HIVAN both as co-ordinator/facilitator and assistant researcher in the orphan programme.

My role in working with the orphaned and vulnerable youth of the project, who named themselves “The Okhahlamba Leaders of Tomorrow”, is to apply a method called transformative facilitation, whereby I empower children and community members with ideas. I find it very interesting doing research and intervention at the same time, and find much personal and professional fulfilment in observing that both researchers and community residents are benefiting from our work.

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