Everywhere I go in the community and every community I go to in this country, I notice a lot of women. In the professional realm, they run the Department of Health clinics in the townships, they reach out to clients as community health workers, and they manage the NGOs. It may be that the healthcare sector is dominated by women here, but there are very few men to be found. It's also common to see women running households, perhaps the men are off working in the mines, and it's even more common to see older women, grandmothers running it.
As I mentioned in the previous post, many children were orphaned when the HIV/AIDS epidemic stole the lives of parents. Many of them sought refuge with their gogos, or grandmothers, who would now take care of their grandchildren since their own children had passed.
In 2001, Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation funded a project now known as GAPA, Grandmothers Against Poverty and AIDS. This project was designed to meet the needs articulated by gogos living in Khayelitsha, a low socioeconomic area outside Cape Town, who were now taking care of their grandchildren. GAPA runs workshops for gogo's with the aim to empower them to take charge of their lives and circumstances through education and transfer of practical skills, like parenting, vegetable gardening, and business/income generating skills.
There is a strong kind of woman in South Africa. Women, especially gogos, hold together the fabric of this society.
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