Nomsa Mwale lived in a wooden shed behind one of the tiny cinder-block houses that line the streets of the outskirts of Harare, Zimbabwe.
At 12 years old, Nomsa was struggling with her new role as a mother. Her father died of AIDS two years earlier, and her mother followed 18 months later.
It was early in the summer of 2000, and I was in Zimbabwe to write about AIDS orphans like Nomsa. Zimbabwe was the eye of the AIDS storm, which had become an orphan-making machine that killed millions of men and women in their prime child-rearing years. Girls like Nomsa and grandparents were forced to raise the orphans, who numbered upward of 800,000.
As the firstborn girl, it had fallen to Nomsa to care for her older brother and the three younger children.
I squatted on the floor of the tidy, 9-by-8-foot shed to interview Nomsa. She was thin and had a sweet, doe-like face. With vacant eyes and wispy voice, she answered my questions. They had little to eat and couldn’t pay the fees to go to school. The few things they had were given by a charity, itself strapped by the overwhelming demands. And as inadequate as this home was, the uncle who owned it wanted to evict them to make way for paying customers.
Their life was a frenzy of survival guided by little more than the advice given by their mother as she prepared her children for their journey without her. “She told me to tell the boys not to go to people’s houses because if something is missing, they will blame them,” Nomsa said. “Momma said, ‘You need to feed the others but also you must learn to take care of yourself.’”
This was good advice; Nomsa dared rely on no one but herself.
I was reminded of my time in Zimbabwe the other day when a group of journalists from Azerbaijan visited our newsroom. The journalists described a country – much like Zimbabwe — where reporters and editors are jailed, exiled or murdered for challenging the government or other aspects of the status quo – the kind of reporting that, frankly, is routine in the United States.
How can you challenge the actions of the government and other powerful institutions in such a place? How do citizens come to understand what’s really important? And more important, how can you possibly tell the stories of the people crushed in these bigger struggles? People like Nomsa.
No Zimbabwean reporter would have dared write about the plight of AIDS orphans. The regime of President Robert Mugabe, who treated journalists as vermin, almost certainly would have seen such a story as an act of sedition.
Aid workers complained publicly about the lack of Western support and quietly about Mugabe’s unwillingness to embrace his government’s role in the struggle. That role is partly educational – campaigning to convince men to use condoms and dispelling myths, such as the pervasive theory that sex with a virgin would cure AIDS.
In a bar not from Nomsa’s shed, the drunken men told me they were saving to buy a virgin. It’s no wonder teenage girls in Africa were much more likely than boys to have AIDS.
I feared for Nomsa and the millions of girls like her who were nearing the fraught nexus of desperation and puberty.
A framed photo of Nomsa and two siblings sits on my desk at work. It was taken a year after my story appeared on the front page of our Sunday paper. They sit smiling in front of a chalk board – proof they found their way into school.
After reading about Nomsa, readers sent thousands of dollars to the Mashambanzou Care Trust, the charity working with the Mwale family. The money provided for some basics as well as a tutor to prepare the children to enter school for the first time. One family became long-term supporters of the trust and the Mwale family, even flying to Zimbabwe to take the children to see Victoria Falls.
“Their support and that of so many other well-meaning benefectors gives us the energy and drive to continue our mission with great compassion and determination,” the trust’s Sister Margaret McAllen emailed me last week.
The brothers and sisters have found productive lives in Zimbabwe, she wrote.
Nomsa is happily married and lives in South Africa. The girl who was forced to act as a mother when she was a child now has a daughter of her own.
This all reminds me again that a free press matters; but, more important, it reminds me that informed readers can change the world.
