Photograph: Leigh Page
In Edendale in KwaZulu Natal, which has the highest HIV rate of any province in South Africa, there are children who had believed, from when they were very young, that they were on daily pills for chronic tuberculosis.
It comes as a shocking revelation to discover that they were born with HIV in a town where it is said in the Zulu language to be a “dirty” infection.
“Most parents don’t know how to tell [them],” says Dr Nonhlanhla Madlala, who works in the clinic of a project called the WhizzKids Health Academy. “The nature of the disease, being sexually transmitted, causes a lot of stigma.
“You find a young person who has been taking medicine since they were born and at 13 or 14 they find they have this disease that everybody has been talking about. Sometimes they discover it by overhearing somebody talking about them or a granny or an aunt gets frustrated and says, ‘Take your pills or this HIV is going to kill you.’”
WhizzKids, funded by the Charlize Theron Africa Outreach Project, gives young people a safe place to come, away from stigma and the judgmental gaze of parents and other relatives. Madlala runs a clinic that offers HIV medication and counselling for young people who are appalled at the discovery of their infection and afraid they will be rejected by their community and wider family and friends if they are open about it. Some of them miss their pills because relatives visit who do not know the secret.
“But the internal stigma is a bigger problem – what they are telling themselves about their disease is more difficult than having to deal with what other people are saying about them,” says Madlala.
WhizzKids helps these children and others who do not have HIV but are at risk because there is no family conversation about safe sex, and adolescents are afraid to go to family planning clinics.
“They ask too many questions,” says Nqobile Maphalala, 18. “Like, ‘Does your mother know you are here? Why are you doing these things?’ Sometimes they even try to call your mother.”
She and her 15-year-old friend, Mandisa Buthelezi, both have boyfriends, they say, but would never tell their parents or carers. “My mother would beat me hard, saying, ‘You are too young,’” says Mandisa.
She lives with her grandmother, four siblings and four other children. She does not know how her mother died – her father left home – but she knows she does not have HIV because she was tested at WhizzKids.
“My gran is the only one working. She goes into people’s houses to clean,” Mandisa says. They live in four rooms in a mud house and a house built of blocks next to it, which she says allows the orphans a little bit of dignity in their community.
Photograph: Leigh Page
In 2010, the academy launched WhizzKids United. Young people gain lessons in self-confidence, learned through football games where obstacles are identified and goals can be reached.
“Young people want to be healthy,” says WhizzKids founder Marcus McGilvray, a British HIV nurse who went to help in the African epidemic in 2002, launching the Edendale project in 2006. “They want opportunities for education and they want to have jobs in the future.”
He has also launched a year-long programme for unemployed, disadvantaged young people aged 17 to 23 called Game Changers, to help them develop skills that will get them into work or university. About 6,000 young people have come through the WhizzKids projects. Now he hopes to open more such projects to help others elsewhere.