Children In Traditional Rural Communities

Children in traditional rural communities

Children in traditional rural communities Msinga/Weenen, northern KwaZulu-Natal

Profile Msinga is in uMzinyathi, one of the poorest districts in KwaZulu-Natal, with very little infrastructure, limited access to essential services such as health and welfare, no piped water, hardly any income-earning opportunities and land that is only arable with irrigation and intensive labour. More than half the households are headed by a single female, their husbands/partners having died or being absent 11 months of the year as migrant workers. There is increasing mortality of parents due to HIV/Aids. The children interviewed are from communities either side of the border between Msinga and the Weenen (uThukela) district.

Observations about access to basic social services for children Children and mothers interviewed said their main problem was food. ‘Water is far but it is there; making a fire is time-consuming but there is still wood,’ said one woman at Mashunka ward. (Children, mostly the girls, from some parts of the Msinga/Weenen district walk an hour or more to fetch water.) Mothers also talked about their problems of getting basic services for their children.

Health At the time of the interviews, a free mobile clinic was serving the communities. Since then, the service, run by the Church of Scotland Hospital at Tugela Ferry, has been suspended due to lack of medical staff and drivers. This means anyone needing medical attention must now travel to the hospital. A return taxi trip costs R26 – and in the case of a child, who will not be treated if unaccompanied, an additional taxi fare for an adult. Patients over the age of six must pay R20 to be seen by a doctor. Community workers report that a visit to the Monday clinic at the hospital is an all-day undertaking, which means patients also need to take or buy food. The hospital is one of the pilot sites for the government’s Mother to Child Transmission (of HIV) Prevention programme (MTCTP). It offers an outreach service through community health workers to follow up women

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Children’s participation study

in the programme. This has included identifying households that are eligible for social benefits such as Child Support Grants, Disability Grants and Foster Care Grants, and assisting them to apply.

Welfare In February 2003, the local community organisation began a process of taking women who were not covered by the MTCTP programme to register for Child Support Grants. They planned to transport nine members of their bead project each week until everyone eligible was covered. Despite this assistance, the women still have to get through a bureaucratic maze to access a grant. First they need birth certificates for their children. If the child was born at home, they go to the traditional leader to ask for a letter with the traditional authority stamp, confirming the name of the child and the place and date of birth. The community workers say Department of Home Affairs officials do accept such letters. The first group of women had identification documents (IDs); in future the community organisation will take women who do not have IDs. They say in order to apply for the Child Support Grant, married women need to also take their spouses’ ID, their marriage certificate and the child’s birth certificate to the welfare office, along with proof of income or, more commonly, an affidavit declaring they have no income. However, most people in this area are not married, or were not married in a court, so they don’t have a marriage certificate. Unmarried mothers are expected to come with the father of the child. However, many of the Msinga men are in Johannesburg or working elsewhere on the farms so they are only home for the December holidays – when the offices are closed. ‘These are stupid conditions,’ a community worker said.

Education Many of the children in this area have to walk between one and two hours every day to reach school. School fees average only R20-30 a year but in the context of high unemployment this is often one of several unaffordable expenses. Many children are out of school due to lack of money for fees, uniforms and shoes. One group of out-of-school children interviewed reported that even if they did not have to pay fees or buy uniforms, they would be unable to attend school for lack of transport/taxi fare or because they would have to go to school on an empty stomach. Some of these children said they and their friends were out of school because the remoteness of the area makes the young girls especially vulnerable to assault.

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Children in traditional rural communities

Profile of a household maintained by child workers Zama1 is 15. She lives in the Mashunka ward in the Mthembu Traditional Authority (part of Weenen). She lives with her mother, four siblings, her late father’s other wife and her five children, her late father’s two brothers and their wives. The only people working in the household are Zama, her 18-year-old brother, and a 15-year-old orphan who has been taken in because he was homeless. Zama’s father was a migrant worker in Johannesburg and was shot dead in a fight several years ago. Zama has had some schooling. Her mother kept her in school for two years by selling firewood to pay her fees. School fees in the area are about R20 a year but when added to the cost of uniform, shoes and food the total expense is unmanageable for many families. Zama is working in a bead project run by a community organisation. She was trained to make bangles two years ago. She can make up to R800 in two weeks if there are enough orders to work full time but the orders are erratic. Nearly all Zama’s money is spent on essentials for the family. If she has a good month, she sometimes buys herself a piece of clothing, or hair relaxer and black hair dye – short, wavy, shiny black hair is the current fashion in the district. Before she and her brother joined the bead project the family relied on ukunana, reciprocal borrowing of money and food. There are still times when they all go without food.

‘It is better for the smaller children to go to school than me.’

Zama says she doesn’t want to go back to school now: ‘It is better for the smaller children to go to school than me.’ On Saturdays she has time to play with her friends; the rest of the time she is working. Musa, aged 18, is Zama’s brother by their father’s first wife. When his father was killed he was in Grade 2 and he was taken out of school because of lack of funds. ‘I had to come out because I had no shoes, no clothes and no fees.’ He has not been back to school since and none of his four younger brothers and sisters has ever been to school. Musa also does beadwork, working from home. He weaves izinkamba (bowls shaped like the traditional clay pots) and lampshades from copper and beads which are sold to ‘people far away, from overseas’. He can earn R800 – R900 a month if there are enough orders but some months there is nothing. When there is no money, the family ask neighbours for food. ‘I am happy to do this work because I get money and because I don’t know how else I could earn a living here. I would prefer to be a policeman or a teacher but with no education this is not possible.’

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Names have been changed.

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If Musa earns enough to buy groceries, he makes a budget: ‘Before anything else I buy 50kg of mealie meal for R200 and spend R150 on isishebo (that is tomatoes and onions, soup, beans or whatever can be eaten with the mealie meal). My favourite food is meat but we normally have only one meal with meat a month, either beef or chicken. ‘I can’t save but if I earn R800 – R900 or more I might make it last for the month. Usually the groceries only last for three weeks. ‘We all eat the same. In other families it is not like that – the worker usually eats better. But I don’t because I am not the head of the household.’

‘It doesn’t

The family gets their water from the river – a walk of about 40 minutes. They use paraffin for lighting and wood for the cooking fire. Their huts are leaking and need repairs and Musa says sometimes he and his mother make and sell Zulu beer at the pension point to get money make me feel for repairs.

good because I should be at school but I am looking after the whole family.’

When Musa’s father died an uncle took over the household and another uncle moved in. They both have wives and several children but are not working. So Musa and his sister are supporting the entire household. How does he feel about that? ‘It doesn’t make me feel good because I should be at school but I am looking after the whole family.’ What could be done to improve his life and by whom? ‘The only thing I can think of is to get a better job so I can go to adult education while I am earning good money.’

Musa has taken in a 15-year-old orphan. The boy stayed with his grandmother after his mother was shot dead but then the family was ordered to leave because the grandmother was accused of stealing cows. He is also doing bead and copper work to pay his way. He went to school for one year but was taken out by his mother, even though at the time his parents were both working. ‘My mother said she didn’t like to pay school fees.’ This boy has been very ill with sores on his back and buttocks. He didn’t tell anyone because he didn’t want to make a fuss and because he was frightened. Since he had no family and since he carried on working, no one noticed he was ill. He couldn’t sit down and was working by lying on his stomach, saying that it suited him. When he started to smell bad the community worker realised he was ill and arranged for him to be taken to the doctor for a course of injections. He is getting better though he still has an ulcerated back. At the time of the interview, another 16-year-old boy was also sleeping in Musa’s wattle and daub room, having no family to stay with. Musa said he took in the boys ‘because I’ve lost my father and I know what it is like to have no home’.

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Monitoring

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Children in traditional rural communities

Process Children aged 12 and older (average age 15) from communities on the Msinga/Weenen border, more than 30 km from the nearest town, were interviewed in February 2003. The children were asked about their how far their needs are met, including their access to basic services, and what they thought government budgeting priorities should be. The children from Msinga/Weenen were self-selected for interviews from a larger group associated with a community-based organisation that runs agricultural extension, income-generation and paralegal advice projects in the area.2 The children were from three traditional Zulu communities where the author has conducted workshops and interviews over the past seven years. The children included girls and boys who were in school and out of school, some of whom were working. The children could not all be involved in one workshop, due to the distances involved and the very varied levels of literacy and self-confidence, which would have inhibited participation. Therefore, three sets of interviews/focus groups were conducted. This reduced the time available for the different sets of activities and so the poverty profiling questions were dropped in favour of participant observation through home and community visits and key informant interviews (with community workers, parents and teachers). The interviews were conducted in Zulu with the help of a long-standing community worker, Mrs Natty Duma. The workshops/focus groups were conducted in Zulu and English and co-facilitated by the author and Ms Thola Mpungose. The researchers spent three days in the community, conducting interviews at the local learning centre, at children’s homes and in the open. They accompanied children fetching water, and walking home from the nearest meeting place and to the ‘local’ school in order to improve their understanding of the children’s daily life and to establish rapport with children they had not met previously.

Activities and outcomes Focus group on needs and budgeting – children in school Seven school-going children aged 15, 16 and 17, plus one 19-year-old and one 20-yearold took part. The children were from Mashunka. There were three girls and six boys; two were siblings. We had a discussion about what were the most important things a person needed to survive. The children called out their ideas and agreed with or contradicted each other. They needed prompting to say what were the most critical needs. For example, children first mentioned education – they said you couldn’t live without education because if you have no education you cannot get a job to support yourself. We had to ask whether there was anything that was needed more immediately for survival and they then mentioned other things.

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Children who took part in the workshop at Mdukatshani ranked their priorities and allocated money from their budget to each item.

The CAP (Churches Agricultural Project) Farm Trust, at Mdukatshani.

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The eventual list of essentials was: Food;

Water;

Clothes;

Education;

Medicine/healthcare;

Agriculture;

Shelter;

Money.

The children agreed that water and food were the top priorities – that a person could survive without clothes, education and healthcare if they had sufficient food and water – and one could even find somewhere to shelter without a house. Two children had said you couldn’t survive without money. When questioned about what use money would be if you were in a place with no food or water, one of the children concluded that money would be no good at all. The other child, a 15-year-old boy, maintained that as long as you had money you could meet all your other needs. We asked what would happen if you were in a desert with no water; suggesting you could die before you could walk to a place to buy anything. He replied that if you had a lot of money you would never be in that situation, you could even buy a plane so that you would not be stuck in a desert and that you could always find someone to sell you what you needed. This child came from probably the most impoverished household in the group and had had a very traumatic childhood.

‘The food on our plates’ The children drew pictures on paper plates first showing their favourite foods and then the foods they usually eat. Favourite foods were commonly chicken (portions or head and feet), cabbage, fruit and juice. Usual foods were mealie meal, cabbage/spinach and beans. There was only one child in the group who drew fruit on his ‘usual food’ plate. Many of the children included the staple beans as a favourite food.

‘The food we need’

The children’s drawings reflected the food they usually eat and the food they would like to eat. As with the other groups, there were some children whose ‘usual’ diet appeared to be healthier and more varied than the others. Observation suggested that these children were from slightly better-off households and not that they were uncomfortable about depicting an inadequate diet.

In pairs or groups of three, the children made lists of all the food necessary to survive, flourish and ‘be happy’. They were told they were allowed to include treat foods such as sweets if they thought treats were important to being healthy and happy. Some children also listed household items that were normally bought with the monthly grocery shopping, such as soap and deodorant. The foodstuffs that were common to all the lists were:

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Beans;

Sugar;

Samp;

Salt;

Flour;

Soup/stock (brand name);

Maize meal;

Potatoes;

Soya mince;

Juice;

Seasoning (brand name);

Bread;

Fruit;

Maas (soured milk);

Margarine;

Meat;

Mayonnaise.

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Children in traditional rural communities

Then the children crossed off the foods that they don’t have every week. This left the foods that they live on from day to day: Beans;

Maize meal;

Flour;

Potatoes;

Sugar;

Salt;

Seasoning (brand name).

Government spending – priorities for spending ‘if I was president’ The whole group brainstormed a list of the things they think the government should spend money on. This was drawn up on newsprint and the children had an opportunity to check if anything was missing. The list was then copied for each pair of children. Each child was given R100 of play money and asked to decide how it should be allocated between the items. Once they had used up all the money, we added the totals and gave an opportunity for them to review the allocations (unprompted – we just said ‘look at the totals for each item and see if they reflect how you intended to spend the money’). A couple of pairs made slight adjustments to reflect priorities – that is, instead of having several items allocated the same amount, they made a R5 or R10 adjustment to show which they thought were the most important items in relation to each other. The allocations were as follows: Item

Allocation by pair

Total (R)

Education

35

45

40

45

165

Orphans

35

20

45

15

105

Pensions/grants

30

25

10

35

100

Hospitals

35

20

30

15

100

Water

35

15

15

30

95

Food

35

25

15

20

95

Employment

35

10

15

30

95

Roads

20

25

20

15

80

Bursaries3

40

15

10

10

75

TOTAL

R9104

After the children had completed this activity they thought of electricity, but decided not to add it as the other items were still priorities.5 3

4 5

The children all listed bursaries as a separate item but clearly it relates to access to education, which means that education is given by far the highest priority in the overall allocations. One pair had been given R10 extra by mistake. In all interviews, food security, distances travelled for water and lack of jobs were highlighted as critical problems. However, Eskom is busy installing electricity in rondavels along the ‘main road’ (a dirt track) through Mashunka. In one household interview, a woman sitting on a grass mat on the freshly dung-smeared floor of her hut pointed despairingly to the prepaid meter box on her mud wall. From this was ran a single cable to a light suspended from the rafters of the thatched roof: ‘I will never be able to switch it on,’ she said. ‘I have no money.’

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Children’s participation study

We then told the children what the actual spending priorities of the South African government were. They were glad to hear that education was in the top three. We expected them to argue that the government should be spending money on supporting orphans and pensioners and providing healthcare rather than on debt and defence. However, one of the 15-year-old girls said: ‘Yes, that is right. We should pay our debts first, before we spend anything else.’ The other children agreed that we must pay our debts: ‘Because otherwise you cannot borrow again.’ This is significant since many households in this district rely on ukunana (borrowing and lending money, food) and if you don’t pay back what you have borrowed you will find it difficult to ask the next time.

Focus group on needs and budgeting – children out of school Ten out-of-school children – six girls and four boys – living in a settlement above Nomoya in Ncunjane isigodi (ward) of Weenen were interviewed at a place called The Station – a clearing in the bush at the top of a mountain where two paths intersect. The children live about an hour’s walk from where we met them and there is no homestead for about 2km. The group met under a thorn tree. Tall grass, twigs and stones had to be cleared before everyone could sit down. The children participating were aged between 13 and 17. The average age was 15. None had been to high school. They had mostly left school between grade 4 and grade 7. One girl left after grade 2 and one 15-year-old girl had never been to school. Three children said they did not go to school because of the distance. The nearest school was eMathinta, far down in the next valley and there is no public transport because this village is quite inaccessible. One of the girls said: ‘It took me two hours to walk to school and I was getting very tired.’ Another three children said they had left school due to lack of money for school fees. Women from the area said another reason some children in the area were not attending school was because men had waited in the bushes and tried to rape the girls. The route to school is hilly and out of sight of the homesteads for quite a distance. Of the ten children, five were living with their mother, four with their mother and father and one with their father and grandmother. Two of the children had the same father but different mothers. Of the absent fathers, one was said to be serving a 15-year jail term, one was away working on a farm and another was simply described as ‘away’. Three had fathers working in Johannesburg who visit them, of whom one said he lived with his mother and father. Seven of the children were from homes with some regular income. Six said there was a migrant worker sending money and one said the household relied on the grandmother’s pension. Family size ranged from four to ten people.

Children’s budget priorities – ‘if I was Trevor Manuel…’ Levels of literacy and confidence in the group were generally low and everything was done through discussion and practical activity, recorded by the researchers through notes and photographs.

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Children in traditional rural communities

Children brainstormed in two self-chosen groups – male and female. They identified ‘the most important things children need’: Water – taps;

Education;

Clinics;

Grants for orphans and older people;

Roads;

Food;

Work.

We had to prompt the children to identify the last three needs. We knew these were issues because several children had already said they could not get to school because there were no roads or transport and they had spoken about lack of income and food but, when they thought about ‘needs’, they first identified services that they knew the government was providing in other areas. We asked the children to say what were the priorities on the items listed. They all said: Education;

Water;

Roads;

Jobs/work.

The children did not know what was meant by a budget. We explained the concept briefly and simply. The children were quite unused to being asked their opinions on anything and were extremely shy in front of adults and strangers. We tried to initiate a discussion about what they thought the government did and should spend money on, but all the children were clearly anxious about answering and we did not pursue this. We then asked them to identify spending priorities among the four needs. This was done by choosing objects to represent the four spending areas and then distributing sweets to each child to be allocated to each of these areas. The two groups each lined up four small rocks. Under one rock they placed a scrap of paper to represent education, a cup of water was placed next to another rock, two twigs on a rock represented roads and a stone on a rock represented work.

The children held a workshop in the bush, using sweets to mark the priority of different spending needs.

Each child was then given ten sweets to divide among the needs to show what priority they gave it. They were asked to put the most sweets next to the area that was most important and the fewest sweets next to the area of the lowest priority. The children then added up the number of sweets allocated and reviewed the priorities. Then they did a final count. The boys’ priorities were: Education;

Water;

Roads;

Jobs.

Education;

Roads;

Jobs.

The girls’ priorities were: Water;

The difference reflected the facts that girls do most of the water collection although some boys also do this. There are boreholes within 2km of the children’s homes but for many months of the year the water level is too low for these to be used.

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