FLYING: Confessions of a Free Woman

I was on my way back home from Sandton yesterday.  We were coming from a Christmas party that the hospital organised for kids with cardiac failure.  We were in a taxi and everybody was tired from job interviews, so the taxi was very quiet except for the soothing music that the drive was playing.

When we reached the robots, a woman was standing there with her kids, one on her back the other on her hand.  She was askign for food or money.  I looked at her and the kids and you could see they haven’t had a decent meal, a bath, or washed and ironed clothes.  I took my left overs from the party and gave it to them.  I also gave them a ten rand note and the taxi took off.

Suddenly everyone was awake and talking.  They were saying all sorts of bad things about this woman:  How lazy she is and the fact that she was using the poor kids.  I didn’t believe it.  Deep down in my heart, I knew that something went terribly wrong and I know she tried to make it and stay strong for her kids.

But, hey life is tough.  It’s the jungle out there.  It’s a survival of the fittest.

I haven’t stopped thinking about her and praying for them to be safe.  I have also realised that I am so blessed to have a roof over my head and running water and clothes.  I can still afford to cook me and the kids a decent healthy meal.  I am also thankful that I can still afford to send my  kids to school and pack a lunch box for them.  Mostly that I have friends who care about me.  I pray that life works out for that lady.  Those kids don’t deserve this life.  They truly have to enjoy being kids, to be protected, loved cared for and to feel safe at all times.

And as for everyone in that taxi who thought all sort of rubbish about that woman, I have on thing to say to you.  Life is a game.  You win if you know how to play and if you are not a quitter.

 It was Monday morning and I woke up to prepare my kids for school, when I noticed that Busi was still sleeping.  So I went outside to Bongiwe’s room to wake her up.  To my surprise and disgust, Busi had slept in the same room with Bongi- her boyfriend- and Lugelo, Bongi’s daughter.

The thing about Bongi’s boyfriend is that he is a convicted rapist.  He was just released from a 15 year jail sentence, for gang raping a girl from our neighbourhood years ago.  And I was against the affair, but also knew that I can’t tell her how to lead her life.  But, again I thought it was not fair that Lerato has to see the guy all over again.

I humbly asked my sister to go meet with her lover some place not at home, and we had a fight.  After sometime I asked her not to sleep in the same room with her daugther and the guy, and we had a fight again.  Then I decided to take a back seat.  After all it’s her life and her daughters.

Oh my god!  I really lost it when I walked in the room to find Busi and the boyfriend.  I couldn’t even control my anger.  We had a heated argument that turned physical.  Truly speaking, I hate the fact that I was born into this family.

My mom and gran believe that I am wrong and Bongi is right.  They think this guy learned his lesson and he won’t do it again.  But I say a leopard wont change it’s spot.  As for Bongi, what is she teaching her young sister?  How can she sleep in the same room with her boyfriend and Busi? As for my parents, why cant they separate wrong from right?  In our culture it’s wrong, immoral and disrespecting for a boy to sleep in a girl’s home.  I don’t understand how a woman can date a man who has no regard for another woman’s feelings.  A man who violated, humiliated another woman’s rights.  A man who took away something special and unique from this girl, something that he can’t take back.  Not even a jail sentence can erase that awful day.

How can my sister fall in love with this animal?  How does she really feel when she makes love to an ex-rapist?  How can she bring this man in our lives for god’s sake?  We also have baby girls.  Isn’t there a chance that one day the devil can start whispering to him?  I don’t want to be there when something like that happens.

I had been to South Africa many times for work and I often told people that, “I had fallen in love with the country”. But what I never explained is that I had also fallen in love with a South African man and perhaps that affected the way I saw the country. As the saying goes, “love is blind” - a phrase I hated when I was younger. But, as the years pass and experience accrues, I see it more and more as true. So when I fell out of love with my South African man, and all the beauty I had seen in him seemed to shrivel up and evaporate in the parched continent’s sun, it happened that on my seventh trip to that country I felt like I was suddenly arriving in a strange land.

Forgive me South Africa, because it is not your fault that my love for you died. In fact, you didn’t change at all. All along those three years I visited you, your terrain was rampant with adult rape, car jackings, robbery, murder and even something I had only learned about because of you - baby rape. Your skin was crawling with black against black violence, white against black violence, and black and against white violence. You had always been a dangerous place hidden behind a severe and blinding natural beauty. It’s just that one day the sun went down in my eyes and in the shadows I fell over the other South Africa, the “picked over skeleton with the skull locked in that horrible scream of death” South Africa.

Before this trip, I remember having a conversation with a woman who worked for an NGO – a non-governmental organization – in Johannesburg where I usually stayed for work. She was an extremely bright Indian woman dedicated to helping end poverty in South Africa. She was running a program that was creating alternative job training for the masses of jobless youth in the African population and she wanted to discuss with me the possibility of helping her create a film training program for teenagers. As we sat and had coffee in a quaint little bistro in an even quainter little town called Melville, where I was staying in a beautiful guesthouse with a pool and palm trees and a four-poster bed, she told me that there was 50% unemployment in South Africa that year. I remember my eyes popping out, yet a warm glow in my gut, thinking that this kind woman would be helping to eradicate that horror.

When I asked how long it would take to reduce unemployment, she looked at me blankly and said, “Oh no, there is no hope of reducing the unemployment rate in South Africa; there will never be enough jobs for the population. Everyone knows that.”

I stared at her with a kind of shock: “But then why do you want me to help create a film training program? Don’t you hope these kids will be able to get work afterwards?”

“No,” she said blithely. “There will never be more jobs in the film business here. We already have way too many applicants for the slots. We can only hope to keep these young people busy for a few weeks…”

I tried to fathom what she was saying as she asked for the check, but I promptly put her words beyond me. You see I was still in love — with the guy, with the dazzling sunshine, with the idea of democracy and a rainbow nation, with people’s ability to argue about politics (something Americans had lost until recently with our new elections.)

But on my last trip to the country, the guy was gone. And it was not a good break up. I suppose you can say I am still picking the shards of glass out of my weak flesh even now, years later. Back then I still didn’t know how much love would cost me, but that is another discussion. Now, I had returned to film a friend of mine Khosi, who lived in Soweto, for the FLYING series I was still in production on at the time. This would be me my last trip to the country for the project. I had filmed Khosi before and what I would record this time never made it into the film, but perhaps was more important than much of what did.

I am trying to explain how the terror rose in me that trip like a snake silently coiling its belly around your spine until it is facing you and looking in your eye. Why you never felt the snake in the first place and why you were standing in a place that had poisonous snakes slithering through the grass is another question that could be asked and should be. For the moment, suffice it to say, up until then I had been too stupid to be afraid.

When I arrived to my little guesthouse in my lovely little town of Melville that I always stayed at, I was still feeling fine; I still thought it was the same country I loved even though the guy was missing. I could do this, I thought to myself, nothing had really changed. But in the middle of the night I got a call from Khosi crying. I tried to ask her what was wrong but she wouldn’t say. She only said that she couldn’t see me the next day as we had planned for filming. I told her – no, begged her – to please let me see her any way, we didn’t have to film, but then the phone cut off. When I tried to call her back I understood she had run out of minutes on her cell phone, something that I had gotten used to happening in South Africa where many people couldn’t afford a permanent plan and bought their time sparingly.

I had no way to get to Soweto alone, so I had to wait until morning, when the driver I had used on many shoots could pick me up and we could head over to Khosi’s new home.  Before leaving, I texted her that I was on my way; she must have bought more minutes, because she texted back, “all right”.  I gave the driver the new address in a poor part of Soweto, which I am telling you because, unbeknownst to foreigners, there are wealthier, middle-class parts of Soweto too. All she had told me on the phone when I had spoken to her from America to set up the meeting was that her life had taken a different turn since I had seen her the last about two years previous. She had moved out of her grandmother’s house and was living with her new boyfriend.

We found the address on a dirt road lined with square one-room government-issued box houses that had been created during the apartheid system. She stood in front of this new house I had never seen before, much like I had left her before in front of her granny’s house. She was wearing a white halter top and jeans, as beautiful as always – and looking about 13 years old even though by now was 22 or so. It was only when I got out of the car that I saw what was wrong, one side of her face was black and blue. She was smiling as always and saying things like “don’t worry Jen” and “I am so sorry I called you last night” and “everything is fine really”. Then she took me by the hand and led me to her home, a one-room shack behind the house I had arrived at, which belonged to her boyfriend’s sister. As we passed, many neighbors came out of other shacks and homes to get a good look at Khosi’s white guest.

Once inside, we sat together on the bed that filled the room, which was neat and covered with a paisley comforter. There was also a wooden dresser and a plastic cooler for milk and food, filled with ice. Between us played Khosi’s new baby girl, now about nine months. She made me tea on a little portable stove in the corner of the room and sat down again.  Khosi explained that when she had become pregnant with her daughter, she had to leave her first child, the three-year-old boy that I knew, with her mother and grandmother because her new boyfriend felt jealous of having another man in the house. Her little girl had been born with a hole in her heart, and a cleft lip, but miraculously they had been able to give the girl open-heart surgery at three months and save her. However, she still wasn’t healthy and Khosi spent her life going back and forth to Baragwaneth Hospital, the only hospital in Soweto, which was a huge ordeal. Khosi didn’t know how long the child would live.

She told me how her Gram had kicked her out of the house when she got pregnant with her second child, calling her “slut” and “whore”, even though this boyfriend was only her second in her life. Her first boyfriend and father of her little boy was the first man she had slept with – and by him she immediately became pregnant. The first guy had beaten her terribly and often, but she had managed to escape. Now, this was her second boyfriend, who at least had a job in the South African army and therefore some money. He was ten years older than her – and she immediately got pregnant again. She swore to me that he rarely hit her and that he was a good man, but that they had gotten into a fight the night before at a party, where he accused her of flirting with another man. She had told him to “go fuck off’ and continued to talk to the same guy, but her boyfriend couldn’t stand it and he had immediately started to beat her. She wouldn’t back down, she said, and so she hit him back, but of course he was stronger than her.

Now she didn’t know what to do. She didn’t want to stay here, but she couldn’t go back to her grandmother’s after she was treated so badly. Her grandmother hated her and preferred her sister. Today, her boyfriend was back at the base, but would be home again in a few days. Anyway, how could she support her child if she left him? She wasn’t able to find a job no matter how hard she tried. Then she began to cry. And I started to cry too. We were hugging each other and crying. You see, we had known each other a long time, since my first trip to South Africa. We had made a film together about her best girlfriend who was HIV positive; we had been through a lot.

“How can I help, Khosi?” I asked softly.

“There’s nothing to do Jen….” She was wiping her tears now.

“Look, what if I can pay for some training…?” I said, wanting to be practical, “I mean if you could get a job, you wouldn’t have to live here…  Is there something you want to do…?”

She looked at me with sadness and shook her head. “I don’t know Jen….”

“Alright…” I said weakly. I was surprised; she had always wanted to go to school before. “Let’s just think together. I am here for you…”

There is nothing like being a stupid foreigner. I knew all too well that what Khosi was facing was so complex and beyond my understanding, that I could only bear witness and pray for intervention. It is a horrible feeling for a person like me, raised on the concept of agency and the ability to change one’s fate if only one works hard enough, to learn that the truth, for many people, in many parts of the world, is that little can help. I knew also that my “being there” for Khosi was relative; I would go home and be safe, and she would not be. So much for being the big, white American savior.

“Jen, I’m scared,” she said.

“I am too, Khosi…” And I was, even thought I didn’t even know exactly why yet.

“I am scared some days what I might do to my child… Sometimes I get so angry, especially with my little boy, that I can’t stop hitting him….” Khosi looked me in the eye to see if I understood what she was saying.

I thought I understood. “You know Khosi, when I was a kid, I saw my mom get so angry at me that I thought, ‘I can’t have children, because I will look at them like she looked at me.’ I was so afraid that I would pass that anger down and hate my own kids that I never wanted to have a baby myself….”

“Yes,” she said, “my Gram was like that to me. She beat me so much; I hated her…. “ She took a deep breath. “But now I am afraid. Jen, some days I am afraid I might kill my children… I love them so much… But I don’t know what to do.”

There was silence in the little shack as we both listened to her baby’s breathing, now asleep on the blanket between us.

“Jen, can you help me get therapy?”

I hadn’t expected her to ask that. I was happy and surprised by the request. But seven trips to South Africa had made wiser to the obstacles I would have to deal with:  “I can try Khosi, when I go back to the guesthouse, I will make some calls…”

”You know I’ve tried going to the social workers that they give you at the hospital, you know like when my father was murdered, or after my sister died of AIDS, and now since the baby was born, I went again…but they all say the same stupid things, like I am not being ‘positive enough about my life’. That ‘I have a bad attitude…’”

Hearing that someone had the audacity to tell Khosi that she wasn’t ‘thinking positively’ enraged me so that I myself wanted to kill someone right then and there. I hated this psychobabble - used again and again by people who really needed some help. And it was rampant in South Africa for some reason, like they’d watched too many episodes of Oprah.

I told Khosi what I thought. But I also asked her if she thought that she needed to be away from her children for a little while. I was worried deeply for them. She said she had strategies of what to do when she felt that way, neighbors she could leave her daughter with; thankfully her son was at her mom’s, but the problem was that when she saw him, he behaved so badly because he was angry at being left there, that she got angry back at him. We talked until the darkness fell and the air turned cool again

When I left Khosi, we hugged for a long time. I would see her several more times on that trip, and I would find her a good therapist, whom she went to see once, but after that session she stopped going (although it would take a few months before this became obvious). The problem was that it took her all day to go back and forth to the good therapist in the fancy section of Johannesburg, actually only 20 minutes away if she could have driven there straight. You see, there is no public transportation system in South Africa – another legacy from Apartheid – so you have to take a series of “Combis”, which are mini-vans driven by private drivers. Each driver packs his van fill of people on a specific route. So it might take her five or six Combis to get to the closest stop to her therapist and then she’d have to walk a half an hour. Who could she leave her baby with? How could she take a whole day just for therapy? Suppose she had a doctor’s appointment for the baby on that day? How could she pay for the transportation? But there were other obstacles too, like when the second appointment came time, it rained, and she didn’t have an umbrella or a raincoat and she was afraid to catch a cold, so she didn’t go.

I tried to solve some of the complications: I had to give Khosi money for the combi rides, but I couldn’t wire it to her directly because she didn’t have a bank account. Meanwhile she couldn’t keep a lot of money on her at any one time, because she could get killed if someone thought she was getting extra cash from a foreigner. So I had to find someone in Johannesburg who would agree to receive the money, but then they had to arrange to get it to her. Then, another fear started to haunt me: What if me trying to help meant her leaving her baby home alone or with a stranger– and then something happening to the baby – like was happening all over south Africa, where mothers had to leave their babies to go to work and gangs of men were coming and raping these tiny beings.

I drove away from Khosi that night, the air ripe with the smoke of kerosene from the gas stoves being lit across the valley of Soweto.  As we passed kids playing kickball in the flickering shadows of bonfires on the dirt lanes, I sat in silence. When I arrived at my guesthouse, the driver let me out and drove off. One of the young car parkers that roamed the street making small change by helping people get parking spots – a job that was created by the government to help unemployment – approached me and asked for some money.

I looked at him surprised, and shook my head, “I don’t have any change…”

“You owe me” he said his eyes menacing. “You haven’t bought me a soda or tipped me and I know you are staying at this guest house. I have seen you come and go….”

“I don’t owe you anything,” I said angrily; somehow Khosi’s story had enraged me against all men. “I don’t have a car and I don’t need parking.”

I marched up to my guesthouse door and pulled out my key. He was standing feet away staring at my back.

“Next time you better bring me something!” he yelled at me and spit on the pavement.

I turned around and gave him the finger. Then I slipped inside and shut the door, which locked behind me.

Once in my room, I sat on my elegant wooden four-poster bed, with the curtains that had little bows holding them back in the middle, looking into the golden-tiled bathroom that was the size of Khosi’s shack. I was breathing hard, trying to catch my breath, furious at the young parking punk from the street, at Khosi’s boyfriend, at the current government that left no hope and no jobs, at social workers who pretend to heal, at the god damn apartheid system who had destroyed a nation and created this mess so complicated it would take a hundred years and so much luck that I couldn’t imagine it to undo the harm that had been wreaked upon this most beautiful country.

I wanted my blessed South Africa back, the one I fell in love with. I started to cry. I was seeing South Africa for the first time and I was gripped with fear - for Khosi, for my black friends, for my white friends, for the strangers I had met, for everyone - and yes, I am ashamed to say, for myself too, because I didn’t want to become one of the twenty-five to fifty percent of the women (depending on the region) who were raped in South Africa that year when I left my gated guest house in the morning. It was easy for me, I just had to make it a few days more to get on the plane out to beat the odds of violent crime, but Khosi couldn’t escape like me. I sat there, engulfed in something I had never felt before, something that was so big, I couldn’t even name it.

Khosi and I remain friends today. She still lives in Soweto but has moved back with her daughter to live with her grandmother, mother, son and other extended family. You can read about her life on her blog here. To date, I have not returned to South Africa.

It’s been seven years and it feels like it was yesterday. 15 November 2001, the day summer became winter and day became night: that was the day I first felt the impact of crime. Things were happening to other people, and I read about terrible deaths in newspapers and saw them on television. I felt pity for them and prayed every day for God to protect the ones I love from becoming statistics.

My dad - my loving, caring, reserved, and protective dad - was brutally murdered by his friends. He was beaten and left to die in the bushes, lying in a pool of his own blood. He died a slow, painful, humiliating death. That day, I lost the only person that made my life worth living. He was everything a daughter could ever ask for in a father. A day before his death, we were tending to the garden and as we were working, he took a deep breath and said, “Girl, you know i don’t want to do this job anymore. I am so tired. I don’t have the strength and power to keep on running away from the law.” I asked him how we are going to survive. He said, “God will provide, and you know that he always has a back up plan.” In case you were wondering what kind of job he had that made him run away from the law, he was a fraud master. At times, he would spend the whole month doing a job without luck, or maybe end up in jail.

The following day, three of his friends came to our home to fetch him early in the morning and they left, same as always. But this time, something went wrong, and my dad didn’t come home that day. The following morning, my siblings and I took off to search for him with the help of one of the friends, and we found his lifeless body, face down. Most of the body was OK, but the face and head were vandalized; you could see the skull just by looking in the big hole in his head. I couldn’t understand, and still can’t, why he had to die such a horrible, unmerciful way. I remember the whole community was shaken by the news of his death… but their pain and disbelief was nothing compared to mine. I found myself wanting to know what he was doing as they were beating him. Was he crying? Was he begging for forgiveness? Or was he quiet and accepting? I wish I could know the last thing that came to his mind as he realized that he was dying and leaving his beloved. What was he thinking about before he took his last breath?

We had no funeral policy, and no money to bury him. Our funerals are expensive too: you have to cook for everyone and organize transportation to and from the gravesite. Thousands of people came to his funeral - he was a people’s man. Jennifer Fox was there for me from day one. She gave financial, emotional, spiritual, and physical support. She paid for the coffin, and the groceries with the help of Robyn, Don, and Teresa. They gave my dad a funeral fit for a king. Jen went as far as paying school fees for my sister and even bought her school uniform. Sometimes i wonder what would have done without her. Wherever my dad is, I know that he is resting in peace. My only prayer now is for the law to take its course, not only for my father’s killers, but for all who commit crime, and for our goverment to create more jobs for people like my daddy. In that way we will all leave peacefully. Jen, Robyn, Don, Teresa: thank you guys very much, may the God of love and peace bless you and give you much more in return. To you, dad: I love you and deeply miss you. Years have passed, tears have dried, but your memories remain in my heart. Rest in peace.

I was having a chat with my girls a few days ago… one of the girls had her heart broken and she was crying. She’d just found out that her boyfriend was seeing someone, and that the lady is expecting his child. She was really heart broken - they’ve been dating since primary school,and they’ve been through ups and downs, break-ups and make-ups, but they always find their way back to each other.

All the other girls were so judgemental and made her feel as if she deserved it. I thought that was not going to help. I said to her, “My friend, you know that I love you and I care deeply about you and your feelings. You know me - I wouldn’t say anything to hurt you on purpose, and I wouldn’t tell you who to date. You have to make your own decisions, choices, and mistakes and learn from them. But, I can see your problem - you don’t understand men and women and how they think.”

I asked her, “Try and remember a time when you were still a young girl; remember your mom would buy you a baby doll and a motor bike for your brother. What would you notice?” She said she would notice nothing, and so did all the other girls. I told them, “We would wash our dolls, dress them, and even go as far as sewing clothes for them. Even when they’ve lost their legs we will still love them, and we wouldn’t allow others to play with our dolls. And the boy will be excited about his motor bike and he’ll let all his friends ride it. After a day or two he’ll just move on to the next toy. And that’s how men are - that’s the way God created things and we can’t change them.”

I told her, “I don’t blame you for hanging on and thinking that things will change. But girl, you can choose to let go and give others a chance to play with your doll, or hang on and be that other toy. The choice is yours. I know it hurts like hell, but just suck it up.”

I have a younger sister – as of a few years ago, she was shy, respectful, understanding, and down to earth.  She knew exactly what she wanted from life and I could see that she was going to make it in the future.  I used to worry about each and everything she needed, and one thing I used to love about her was the way she always understood if I couldn’t do something for her.  I was trying to prevent her from getting into relationships for all the wrong reasons.  I wanted her to learn from my mistakes.

Recently things have changed - at first we received complaints from her schoolteachers and headmaster that she was skipping school and doing drugs during school hours.  I spoke to her, trying to be more of a civilized sister, but she lied through her teeth, and I couldn’t beat her since the law doesn’t allow me to.  So I took her to the police.  They told me that they think she’s got stress and unresolved issues and they organized therapy for her.  Months passed and I still didn’t see any improvement in her behavior.

One day while I was reading a book I saw something that helped me see right from wrong, I learned more about warning signs and she had all of them.  She was always tired, lazy, had a big appetite, and was very rude.  I tried my best to make her understand that she was headed for nowhere.  I’ve been there, done that.  I begged her to pull herself together and clean up her act.

On Sunday I arrived home to find out that her friends, their boyfriends, and she went to a picnic on Saturday morning and never came back home.  I was so mad I could see the smoke coming out of my mouth.  Finally she came back, and she had so much attitude it made me sick.  She didn’t care, she believes that at 14 she is old enough to make up her own mind about her life - not if she’s got anything to do with being my younger sister.  I then beat her so much she started to bleed.  My mom was mad at me and she told me that I must leave her baby girl alone, since she didn’t break into someone’s house and she was only enjoying herself.  She told me that nobody asked me any questions or punished me when I started sleeping out.  I told my mom, I was 21 years when I broke my virginity and if it wasn’t for peer pressure I would still be a virgin, and I never did drugs.  I wish she could have punished me, if only she had showed some concern and played her role as my mother I would be a better woman today.  And I am not going to stand by and let her destroy my young sister’s life.

Yesterday I bought a job market paper - I wanted to try my luck.  To my surprise, there was no job I could apply for, since I don’t have any qualifications.  The only job that was available was domestic work.  When I realized that, I started crying.  I asked myself, what have I done?  Why is God punishing me?  I’ve been good to Him, I am a loving, caring, honest person, and I will always think about others and share the little things I have with them.  Then my baby girl walked in and she started to cry.   She opened her arms and hugged me and at that instant I knew I had to stop crying, to avoid her asking me why I am crying.  I can’t let my kids know that their mommy is a failure.

I had an unhappy childhood that contributed a lot to the situation I am in today.  My parents were both unemployed and uneducated and most of their off-days drowning in alcohol.  My father committed crime to at least put food on the table, and most of his other time was spent in prison.  As a result, we had to stay with our grandmother who was also unemployed and owned a shebben as a source of income.  She took out all of her stress on me, and all the beating and swearing has affected me to this day.  And now history is repeating itself - my siblings and I are unemployed and uneducated.  I sometimes wish I wasn’t born into this family.  I am going to try and give it my best, I will do it for my kids.  I can’t suffer for the rest of my life.

I’ve had so many chances, but messed them up.  I am no longer a little girl, play time is over.  I have to do this right this time, I have to secure the future of my kids.  They are looking up to me and no one can do that for them except me.

I don’t know if I should be happy or sad, laugh or cry.  My brother just got released from prison after serving two years for armed robbery. I didn’t know how to react.  Some say I am cold and heartless, maybe I should have given him a hug or a kiss, but I couldn’t.  I was not happy about his release.  The thing is, we don’t see eye to eye since I had him arrested for stealing my clothes to buy drugs and booze.  And the second time we had a fight he kicked me in the stomach and I was six months pregnant at the time.  We have never gotten along since.  My mom and gran were not talking to me for having him arrested - they wanted me to drop the charges, and I did for the sake of peace.

If I remember correctly, he started doing drugs and crime at the age of twelve and dropped out of school in grade five.  Since then, he’s been in and out of prison, and my mom has always maintained his innocence.  So the thing is,I’ve got a baby boy who is six years old, and he looks up to him since he’s the only fatherly figure in his life.  I’ve got my own way to discipline my son and my mom is always on my case, she wants to teach mea how to discipline my son and she can’t even do that for her own son.  I only want the best for my son, I want to teach him respect, responsibility, and I also want him to know that nothing is free, he’s supposed to work hard .

Truly speaking I’m not happy about his release, I’d rather he be dead than alive and causing trouble.  I know him better than anyone in the family does, he will soon go back to his ways.   I don’t want my son to be there when he starts doing all the wrong things.  Maybe I am bad, anyway I don’t care, they’ve made me be what I am in a way.  My mom never cared for me, she was always too drunk to notice that I was around and needing her.  I struggled on my own, until I met Jennifer Fox, who inspired me to talk about my experiences.  She made me realize that nothing and no one is more important than me.  And that I should give my kids all the love, protection, and care they need.  So I am doing that - I just want to protect my son from the life I lived.

I got home from work to find out that my boyfriend mood hasn’t changed. I then started cooking, bathed my baby, and tried to make conversation but no one else seemed in the mood for talking. So, I kept trying to create new conversation and admittedly started an argument. By this point my boyfriend was arguing and although I have told myself that I am done begging him, asking for forgiveness I continued to do so… even though I felt as though my opinions were justified. While we were arguing he said something to me that caught me so off guard it took me an hour to adjust. For a minute I thought that I was imagining things, I took a deep breath then a paused and asked him to say to me what he has just said, to my surprise I had been right and there was nothing wrong with my hearing aid.

He said, “You are a bloody murderer.” I had nothing to say… no words could come out, only tears… tears of sorrow, regret, and painful memories that I have tried my best to bury. My god, I wished I could drop dead and die that instant. When he told me this he took me back to that night, that terrible night. I was quiet for a long time and so was he, he was looking at me and you could see that he wished he could take his words back, he could see that he had hurt me, deeply.

If I remember, it was last June when I realized that I was pregnant with his child. I called him to tell him the news and he asked me to wait for him to come home and said that we would discuss the matter then. I did as he said, although I was confused by the wait. In the meantime I was thinking that I knew in my heart that I could not have another baby.
I have two children with different fathers, and my 3-year-old daughter Azania was born with many health complications. She is suffering from heart failure and asthma… to make matters worse I was not working when I found out about her illnesses.

It is so hard to realize that I’ve got two children that already I can’t support, what was I going to to with the third one? And I thought about the possibilities of him leaving me for someone else, alone to raise our children. I had already made up my mind; I knew what I had to do. So when we talked about the matter in a civilized manner he seemed understanding and supportive, we agreed that we couldn’t have another baby while Azania is still young and sick. He said while he was working I need to go back to school and continue my studies in order to find a job. He was so understanding, I nearly changed my mind and I thought to myself that he was too good to be true.

The plan of action was to terminate the baby. Then I went to the hospital to get myself on the waiting list because I couldn’t afford to pay a doctor. I was in the top 10 of the women who were seeking an abortion. The procedure here in South Africa is that they give you pills you take them home and insert them yourself. All of this you have to do alone and the nurses tell you that no matter how much pain you feel don’t come back and don’t call the ambulance.

You can only come the following day to have your womb cleaned. I arrived home from the hospital around 6 pm and I then inserted the tablets in my Vagina and a maxi-pad in my underwear and fell asleep.

In the middle of the night I felt something unusual so I woke up and went to the toilet to check what was wrong. As I took my panties off I saw something but it was covered in my blood so I couldn’t see it very clearly. I wiped the blood with toilet paper and as I was wiping it I realized it was a baby, my baby, my own flesh and blood. I looked closer and I could see the little formed body parts. I cried, I felt so dirty and thought I have just killed a defenseless child, my own baby.

I wanted to take what I had done back, I lost my mind, I bathed myself and scrubbed myself so much I ended up with a very painful infection. Then, the real problem began and I fell sick with very bad headaches and lost my appetite. I had other emotional problems and started to resent the two kids I had, I felt as if I couldn’t give him my love why should they have it?

I used to have dreams and hopes of a beautiful life, but I now I don’t think I will ever experience those dreams as a reality. Everyday, morning and night, I think about what I did and the picture is still in my mind. It doesn’t matter how happy and pure I pretend to be; what I did is eating me alive. I am so ashamed of the thing I’ve turned out to be.

People often say there is a lesson to learn in everything but I have gone through so many experiences, and I am still waiting for understanding to come. I just hope that as time passes things will improve. Maybe one day I will begin to feel at peace with the decisions I have made, and the life I have in front of me… for myself and my family.

Khosi is 24 and was born in Suwet, South Africa where she grew up with five siblings. Due to the harsh economic effects of the Apartheid her parents could not find work, and so Khosi relocated to live with her grandmother. When she was 13 she moved back in with her father in attempt to reconnect with him, but after two years she moved yet again. Her father supported himself through acts of fraud and in 2001 was brutally killed by his associates for 1,000 Rand they had all stolen together.

Khosi dropped out of high school because she could not afford to purchase a uniform, and later took a course in HIV/AIDs counseling but was unable to find work. Khosi and her boyfriend recently had a baby girl together who was born in need of open heart surgery, and doctors told her not to get attached. The baby survived, and is being raised by Khosi, her mother, grandmother and boyfriend.