Issue 808
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82-year-old Nokhayinethi Dyantyi, will be the first person in South Africa to be operated on for preventable cataract problems by the Fred Hollows Program at Frontier Hospital, Queenstown. |
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A healer man from Xhosa Photos: Sandy Scheltema |
W e ate lunch under a mimosa tree last Wednesday, near a crumbling two-room clinic where people from the village of Nkunnca Machibini walk to see a nurse. Each day for nearly a week we'd come to this valley in the Transkei, where tiny huts and mud brick homes - bright green, blue and pink - are surrounded by mountains of extraordinary beauty.
Only half an hour out of Queenstown and accessible by 4WD, we'd come to this very poor world of subsistence farming, with cows and goats in stone fences in back yards, chickens running free, corn and vegetable in all the yards, no cars, no phones - and electricity just recently courtesy of Nelson Mandela - to find a blind person and promise sight.
We saw two men in the distance, one holding the others hand, walking towards us through the tall yellow grass. The younger man, Dickson Magibisela, introduced Nelson Vakele, 72, blind through cataracts for 10 years. Our interpreter, Tillie Tshangela, a retired schoolteacher and Hollows volunteer, called Dickson 'the path finder'. They sat on our blanket and revealed that we had found, at last, the man whose house we had visited many days ago, after a letter from Queenstown's Frontier Hospital informed him of our visit and our wish to photograph him and stay the night.
Could he see, please? Could we do that? Tillie told the men in Xhosa, the language of this province, about the Hollows program, and that from next week an eye doctor would operate from the Frontier hospital, and how he could visit the clinic and get on the waiting list.
Nelson had also come to say sorry. He sheepishly confessed that he knew the Hollows journalists would be coming in the morning, so he'd got up at dawn and run into the bush to ensure that no matter how early we were, he'd be gone.
Nelson explained that his family could not understand why white people used to sofas would want to stay in a poor man's house. They felt ashamed of how they lived.
Nelson had missed his chance to become the first blind person in Hollows first South African program to see as early as Tuesday, the day of its launch. Instead, photographer Sandy Scheltema had found Nokhayinethi Dyanti. She is 82, the mother of 11, including four sets of twins, totally blind in one eye, her sight fading daily with a cataract in the other. She lived on the edge of the village, matriarch of a large extended family based around a round, thatched hut with turquoise walls. She would soon lose her capacity to do the cooking on her open fire outside, or to supervise her grandchildren.
We'd got to know Nokhayinethi and her family quite well over the past few days. We'd heard her nine-year old grandson Sambonga sing in his school choir and given he and his mates a lift home. We'd watched other grandsons milk the family cows in their back yard and we'd taken tea in her home. The word had spread, and the fact that Nelson had found us established that that the people in this village had decided to trust us.
We farewelled Nelson and walked the dirt tracks to Nokhayinethi's home.
The family expected us - they had dressed up and borrowed stools and sat around the perimeter of the round hut, pressed dirt floor spotless, to hear our news. Nokhayinethi sat on the bed she slept in. Her daughter-in-law and her tiny daughter, dressed in a shiny orange dress, sat beside her on a stool. Nokhayinethi's son faced her from the other side, on a bench, and four grandchildren huddled behind another bed, in the dark.
The operating theatre was booked for Monday, as we'd advised, but the ward staff insisted that she check in on Sunday for observation. We would pick her up in the afternoon and drive her down. She nodded, and as we began to talk of other things an old man with a walking stick, dressed in a grey suit jacket and his best hat, entered the house and introduced himself. He was nearly blind, and he'd heard we had come to fix people's eyes. Another blind man arrived, then another, and another stool was borrowed. Tillie explained the program and they asked questions.
I realised the personal responsibility Sandy and I had assumed without realising it. Not only had Nelson run away when we'd come before, but when Sandy found Nokhayinethi, she'd had no intention of having an operation. She'd thought she was going blind and that was that. She would never submit to such an operation, which she saw as 'peeling' her eyes off. She'd only agreed to go to the Frontier hospital for an eye check after Nombeko had spoken to her at length, face to face in her home, and given assurances that an eye test was without risk.
Sandy, Tillie and I came the next day to drive her down. She was still unsure, but had dressed up for the occasion - a bright blue turban hat, layers of colours and patterns and a black and blue jumper.
The Frontier eye clinic was full to bursting with people waiting for tests, waiting to be put on the list for the Hollows doctor, Nigerian specialist Ayodeji Adu. Nokhayinethi walked jauntily to the front of the queue and Sister Nombeko checked her eyes. She leaned forward, placed her hands on Nokhayinethi's knees, and spoke slowly and intently with her for 10 minutes in Xhosa.
'She has agreed to have the operation,' she said. Nokhayinethi had asked several questions, including whether she would wake up if she was put to sleep. She trusted Sister's answers, and was satisfied.
Her son joined another queue to have his bad back checked and would be there for hours, so we took her to our hotel to rest.
We stayed at Top Town, a rich white suburb where you might forget that apartheid was dead and that blacks now ruled the nation. Most residents are retired and many of their children have migrated to Australia. It felt like a museum: black maids and gardeners, manicured lawns, security gates, where residents maintained the pretence that nothing had changed while knowing everything had.
Our hosts were Bob a retired engineer who spoke fluent Xhosa, and his wife Ann. Because of what he called 'the troubles', all bar one hotel had closed. Ann's neighbour and fellow B & B operator, Agnes, said that because some of the now-admissible black guests had stolen everything - sometimes even completely stripped their rooms - hotels had become unviable. So seven white families had got together to set up bed and breakfasts to meet the demand from businesspeople and black and white bureaucrats. Whites now host black visitors and cook their meals in this rural corner of the new South Africa.
When we arrived, Bob and Ann were in the front yard with their four-year-old granddaughter Courtney. We introduced Nokhayinethi, who smiled broadly when she saw the little girl and extended her hand. Courtney cringed ever so slightly and looked a little frightened even, until she took the old woman's hand. Old instincts are still young in the new South Africa.
Nokhayinethi sat in our armchair and loved the comfort of it so much she would not get up, even to lie on the bed. She said that she'd never been inside a white person's house and thought she never would. At the top of the mountain behind this house her husband had worked to build a road. That was the closest anyone in her family had come to this area.
Then she started laughing. She said that when she'd sat in the hospital queue, many people had asked why she was getting special treatment and who the white woman with the camera was. Ah, she replied, I was Sandy's nanny many years ago, before Sandy went abroad and now Sandy was visiting her beloved Nanny to get her sight back.
Sandy put her portable computer screen up close to Nokhayinethi's eyes to show her photos of her son, her grandson, and herself. She was shocked - she had never seen herself before. Sandy showed her photos of her home, in a small town outside Melbourne, and relatives and friends, and Nokhayinethi said she now knew that people were the same the world over.
She settled deeper in her chair and began chatting. She had always lived in her village. Its people seemed to have suffered less than most from apartheid. They had not been dumped in other places or separated by the need to find work. The whites had taken their land but many had remained living there and worked on the farms. They'd got back their land as part of the homelands policy when Transkei became a puppet black province.
That night, Ann complained that this land had helped produce food for the nation. Now, the black farmers grew corn and vegetables in the traditional way and tended cattle and goats for their own use. There was nothing left over to feed the cities. Agnes complained that the Frontier Hospital used to be first class - indeed, her husband Basil had been born there. It was a hospital for blacks too, although most staff were white back then, she said, but 'now it is derelict'. Whites now attend a private hospital.
Next Monday night, after seeing Nokhayinethi's operation, we stayed in the village at the house of the elder who'd looked after us. She had a barbecue, a party. We asked her to bring together the blind people in the village with cataracts for a photograph. Sandy hopes to come back in a year to see which of them can see. While the Hollows foundation and the government do their statistical and performance audits, this will be our measure of the program's success.
On Tuesday morning, we packed as many of Nokhayinethi's family as we could fit into the back of our 4WD, plus a couple of children who have befriended Sandy. Dr Adu took off the bandages at the launch.
We asked the school Sambongo attends to send their junior choir, in which he sings, to the launch. Tillie has arranged their transport. They sang for us last Wednesday in a room of broken windows without chairs under a collapsing roof. Like most rural black schools we have seen, and the school in Queenstown servicing the black slums, there are no books and no equipment.
The choir sang songs of soaring purity and complexity of harmony that seemed to me to merge the beauty of the scenery outside with the beauty of the voices within. Listening and watching 60 small, poverty-stricken children born among these magnificent mountains sing and dance to their audience of two in their squalid school room was my magic moment in South Africa until Tuesday, after Nokhayinethi's bandage was removed from her eye.
She was taken to the Hollows Foundation launch tent in the hospital grounds and introduced to the crowd. Later, in her hospital room with her family, she bounced out of bed and sung a 'thanksgiving hymn' low and slow, swaying her body and her arms. Her family joined in. We took her home.
Email: mkingston@mail.fairfax.com.au
Margo's web diary - www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/webdiary/
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Out of Africa
