Girl about the village

I met Ziyanda in Mbotyi. We walked for a while together along the dirt track that leads out of the village. Ziyanda is 25. She wears jeans, weaves her hair in dreadlocks and works as a lifeguard, tourist guide and waitress at the local hotel. I want to talk to her because I want to know what it's like to be a young woman living in a rural village. She smiles as she talks about her life.

She got pregnant at 15. “My mother was so crazy with me,” she says. By 16 she had two children, a boy and a girl. I asked if she was still with the father? “He died,” she says. “Of pneumonia. He was also a lifeguard.”

Being seriously ill in Mbotyi is a dance with the death. There is no clinic. The building is finished, it has a waiting room, toilets, a security fence, but its doors remain closed because electricity has not yet arrived in the village. Well, that’s not quite true. White people own holiday cottages along the beachfront and all their cottages have electricity. There’s also a lodge – where I stayed for two nights – and they also have power. It’s just the black villagers who don't. Apartheid lives on - courtesy of the local municipality. So until the power comes to the people, the closest clinic is in Magwa, a five-hour walk away, or if you can afford transport, the closest clinic is a 26km taxi ride in Lusikisiki. To get a private emergency taxi costs R300.

I asked Ziyanda if rape is a worry for women living here. She told me she was raped in 2003 when she was walking home at night time from work. “I was so scared. It’s not easy to be a woman, I can say. You are facing so many challenges.”

The sound of our footsteps grew louder at this point. My voice sounded loud in my head. At a glance Ziyanda looks like any modern girl about town. But the reality is, she's a modern girl about a rural South African village, and the odds are stacked against you. Ziyanda has experienced more hardship in her young life, than most women will experience in a lifetime. And yet she smiles. And laughs. And talks honestly.

I try to find a clever way to bring the subject around to HIV/AIDS, but there isn’t one, so I just blurt it out. I ask her if she knows how many people in this village have HIV/AIDS. She says no one talks about it. “We can’t talk about it. No one talks about it. In our culture it is so difficult to talk about sex. We’re not like white people who can talk about it.” I tell her my mother is from Yorkshire and never talked to me about sex and periods either. My first boyfriend was always just called “my friend”.

So what happens if you have HIV/AIDS? Can you not even talk about it to your best friend? “No, you can’t talk about it. Maybe to your family, but no one else.” But does everyone know about it? “Yes, everyone knows about it. We are very scared of it.”

If there is so much awareness and fear, does that mean that the HIV/AIDS rate will start to drop? “No. You see these young children who are now growing up. When the girls are 15 they will fall in love for the first time with a madala (older man) who will HIV/AIDS. He can’t talk to them about it, he won’t use a condom, and so they will get sick.”

I asked her if she wants to date a new boy does she ask him if he has HIV/AIDS. “Yes, I will ask him, but I can’t trust what he tells me. It’s very hard to find a new boyfriend.”