African AIDS grannies meet Canadian counterparts
CTV.ca News Staff
About 100 African grandmothers are visiting Toronto with the goal of returning home better equipped to help their grandchildren survive in a continent devastated by HIV.
The grandmothers will join about 200 of their Canadian counterparts for two days of workshops dubbed the Grandmother to Grandmother Campaign, as part of the run-up to the 16th International AIDS Conference that officially begins on Sunday.
The women are from 10 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, and are involved with roughly 30 AIDS and HIV projects.
The Toronto meetings will cover a number of topics designed to help African grandmothers care for their grandchildren whose parents have died from AIDS; earn money for school and food; and to give their grandchildren the skills they need to survive when they too are gone.
"They are here to talk urgently and deeply with Canadian grandmothers about their needs, their priorities, and what they confront around the orphaned kids," Stephen Lewis, the UN's special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa told CTV's Canada AM.
Officials estimate that the number of children in sub-Saharan Africa who have been orphaned by AIDS will rise from the current 13 million to 20 million in the next four years.
It will put a tremendous demand on the grandmothers, Lewis said.
"All of these grandmothers have buried their own adult children. I mean, it's one of the most painful truths about what's happening with the pandemic. And then they suddenly find in their later years that they're parenting again, with very young orphaned children."
Many of the children have HIV themselves, and the grandmothers are beginning to experience a second wave of loss as HIV and AIDS begins to claim their grandchildren's lives.
"It's painful really, and I think by coming here we are going to learn, we are going to talk to the other grannies from Canada about what we have been experiencing, which means a lot to me," Lucia Mazibuko, the director of the Go-Go Grannies in South Africa told Canada AM.
Lewis said the journey to Toronto not only marks the first time many of the grandmothers have left Africa, but the first time many of them have left the immediate area of their own small village.
"This is the first time grandmothers have come together internationally," Lewis said. "Grandmothers have become the unsung heroes of the continent. They do such remarkable work, Lucia and all her grandmother colleagues, and now they're meeting with Canadian grandmothers to set out a kind of an agenda of mutual support."
Ilana Landsberg-Lewis is the executive director of her father Stephen Lewis's charitable foundation.
She came up with the idea of the gathering, and echoed her father's words, describing the grandmothers as unsung heroes.
"We have a continent in real crisis," Landsberg-Lewis told The Canadian Press. "And the grandmothers themselves are bereft and in an agony of loss, depressed and isolated. And the orphans, their grandchildren, are also desperately sad and bewildered and angry.
"And it is really the grandmothers who are keeping families, communities and, indeed, ultimately countries together as they nurture the young children into the future."