Getting on the map

I first met Nolwazi Skweyiya several years ago during an evaluation of government efforts in South Africa's Western Cape Province to support the community-based response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The provincial government had money from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to provide seed funding for projects run by small community-based organizations (CBOs) and larger NGOs. These projects were supposed to mobilize volunteer support within communities to aid those infected and affected by HIV.

When we first met, Nolwazi was managing a relatively large volunteer operation from her two-roomed shack in a township on the edge of Cape Town. Her CBO, Sinethemba Support Organisation, had fourteen homebased carers (HBCs) who cared for HIV-positive community members in their homes, a team of eight young sexual health peer educators who counselled friends at school about HIV, sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and pregnancy, and three women who managed an informal daycare centre for local mothers who could not afford formal childcare. These volunteers also distributed 150 food parcels each month: packages of flour, sugar, rice and oil that were provided by the Department of Social Development (DSD) to qualifying families in the area.

Nolwazi had been running Sinethemba since 1999, long before the Global Fund initiative had arrived. When she started the group, she was living in an even smaller shack in the backyard of a neighbour’s plot. The effects of the HIV epidemic were just starting to be felt in her impoverished community and in the absence of any coherent government or civil society response to the growing catastrophe, she and many women like her started caring for their sick neighbours and enlisting others, often from their churches, to help.

At first, her efforts were informal and took place amidst her other obligations to her husband and two children and the domestic cleaning work she did three times a week for a family in a middle-class suburb. Her volunteer work grew rapidly, however, and she soon started working nearly full time along with two other women from her church. They in turn recruited others who helped out on a more part-time basis. These volunteers often left as soon as opportunities for paid work came along but as soon as one person left, Nolwazi told me, there always seemed to be someone else ‘with a heart for the community, for the suffering people’.