Bravery in adversity

No one quite knows how long it’s been since Theresa saw her grandmother.   At least five years, she thinks, but it may be more.

Theresa is 13 years old.  When she was six, a social worker found her on a rubbish tip in Zambia.  She’d run away from her grandmother's home with her younger brother.

The social worker took them to a government transit home, where abandoned children were taken into care.  Then, both Theresa and her brother were settled into SOS Children’s Village Lusaka.

So, when one day Theresa became our Africa chief reporter for Zambia and had the chance to film her life, she decided along with her SOS Mother to visit her grandmother.  It was potentially a hugely emotional experience.

Grandmother lived in a traditional Zambian home, a small hut made of mud blocks, roofed with thatch and with an outside set-apart area used as a latrine. No plumbing or electricity.

Theresa was determined to face up to it. She wanted to become a journalist and, camera in hand, she was out to prove that she could be calm.  She would find her grandmother; she would interview her, and she would do so without crying.

Love and hardship

Patiently, she waited outside the hut as her grandmother appeared from working in the fields.  Suddenly, there she was, bounding forward, smiling broadly, welcoming Theresa and remarking how much she’d grown.

Grandmother is aged 52, a quite remarkable age in a country where life expectancy for women is in the early 40s.  She was surviving – just.  She said she couldn’t afford to eat more than one meal a day and that she hadn’t eaten bread for two months.  The chickens running around were beginning to reduce in number as they were slaughtered for special meals.   But it wasn’t just herself she was struggling to feed; it was the 10 grandchildren who lived with her in the hut. Grandmother slept on a mattress and the grandchildren slept huddled on the floor.

Grandmother had had five children but only one had survived HIV/AIDS.   Every time she went to a family funeral, she brought home another grandchild or two.  She had so many, and there was now so little room, that Grandmother was building a second hut nearby her own – block by block of mud.  She didn’t know when it would be finished.  Her plan was to house the grandchildren there.

When Theresa saw the poverty her grandmother was living in, her face went serious and she went quiet.  Later, Theresa said she was shocked to see how desolate were her grandmother’s living conditions compared with her own.   But she was pleased that Grandmother appeared happy – like so many Africans living in poverty, she smiled beaming white-teeth smiles and danced outside her hut with joy, celebrating Theresa’s visit.

She’s a professional

Theresa did her interview; asking Grandmother about what life was like in Zambia when she was Theresa’s age; how Grandmother lived now and what her hopes were for the future.  And if there had been in Theresa’s mind questions about how she ended up on a rubbish tip with her brother, all were swept away by the occasion.