Ursel Barnes’ Yabonga – The Cape project transforming young lives

This is the Rational Perspective. I’m Alec Hogg. In this episode Ursel Barnes and her inspirational Yabonga.

Life is full of paradoxes, amongst them that the greatest of those who walk among us are really the ones who are most widely celebrated. A number of the uncelebrated souls who’d make my top-10, from thousands of newsworthy people that I’ve met and interviewed in almost 40 years of journalism, include a modest German nun, Sister Elizabeth Schiller, and Tich Smith, a former sportsman who hit the gutter before a spectacular rebound in a higher power directed guise. They achieved great things by serving their fellow human beings, and in particular, SA’s less fortunate. Tich is the founder of the LIV Village in KwaZulu-Natal. Sister Elizabeth, has given her contribution through St Joseph’s Care Project at Zizanani.

Their selfless efforts have literally changed the fortunes of thousands of people. The focus of today’s episode falls into the same, rarefied category so, let’s meet Ursel Barnes and hear her story. Starting with how she arrived in SA.

I arrived in late 1997, and I had two small babies, one was two months old, and one was a year and a half. I grew up in West Berlin and, as you know, West Berlin is a city that was divided by a wall but we were the same people. I would have had direct cousins on the other side. SA reminded me of my hometown. It was a beautiful side, which was very inviting to tourists like me, but there was also this other side that I was keen to explore. I arrived to do a pilot license, and I wanted to do a flying license, and I planned to stay for two months, and then just go again.

But I fell in love with the mountain, flying into the sunset, and I decided to holiday home, come back, and I eventually stayed. I went to university in Austria, and studied business and finance. Then ran a hedge fund with my first husband, which was a technical futures training approach, it was the early 90s and it was a very good model, and we had loyal clients and it made a lot of money for a while.

In hedge funds did you learn much about yourself or about how the world works by making a lot of money in a financial services area?

We were not trying to weed the trend and the best investment, but we were just shifting the probabilities from 50:50 to 49:51, and by doing so, we invested in lots of different markets, and the biggest learning was probably that you don’t try to second guess markets. You just read the signals and you have a very strict discipline on money management and allocations, and you diversify so, the biggest learning was probably the self-discipline part.

Okay, so just your typical German superwoman, overachiever, with a doctorate in finance who discovers Cape Town and decides, she wants to become one with the mountain – well, not quite. As I started to discover when exploring how she invests her money nowadays.

But I do, I’ve also shifted a little to impact investments, and social investments where I try to see people who want to have a commercial object but at the same time, want to live in a better world being them but with a bit of legacy for the environment, for people, just to do a little bit of good. I also think that’s the next generations approach to investing. They’re still keen to make money but they also want to do it in a good way, which doesn’t leave too many people disadvantaged.

And that brings us to the purpose of this interview, 20 years ago, Ursel Barnes together with Ulpha Robertson, co-founded one of the most successful HIV related charities in SA, called ‘Yabonga’ (Thank you). It grew out of exposure to the beauty and beastly parts of Ursel’s new home.

I was doing six-months in SA, six-months in Austria and used my connections to the financial world to do my first fund raising. I used some of my own money but I also got money from Germany and Austria to fund Yabonga’s early years.

What is Yabonga?

Yabonga is a charity for HIV infected children, and their affected families. We started 20 years ago as a purely children orientated organisation. Until we bumped into the problem that communities were rejecting their own children because of their HIV status.

Where did the door open? Where were your eyes open towards this particular need?

If you come to SA as a tourist, you’d want to help the neediest of the needy and the poorest of the poor, and that will always be the children. They don’t have a voice. They really victims so, that’s where I started. I wanted to help women who were supporting backyard crashes because I was very impressed by the power of the African woman. The natural ability to just sweep children off the street and with no financial means at all – give them a home, look after them, and love them. Let them dance, and have fun and a little bit of homework help and I wanted to support that.

What kind of women are these?

You’re know, they’re the regular African women that we can learn so much from. They’re the tradition pillar of strength in the African culture. They kept the families together in the villages when the men went into mining. They looked after the families when the men went into trucking and transporting, and were away forever. Still today, there are grandmother in the Eastern Cape that often see their own children go to the cities and then come back, once they’ve lost a lot of weight, and suddenly there’s this rumour of HIV and their children die and the grandmothers keep the families together so, we’ve seen them always, and they are still the pillar of the community.

So, 20 years ago, you decided you wanted to help. How do you turn that into action?

You know, helping, let me just start there – helping always sounds so one-sided and I really didn’t want to be the next new blonde neo-colonialist that comes to Africa and saves black children. I did from the beginning. I was private and had just separated from my husband and I was not happy so, I didn’t feel like I immediately want to help in order to feel better. I just really felt always that it was a two-way street. I got as much back as I was able to support. I prefer to say support rather than help because I do think I always got a lot back.

So, how did I decide that? I arrived, I thought CT was beautiful. It was easy to go to Clifton and enjoy the beautiful life, but it’s hard to ignore that it has another side so, I tried to look at other projects. I found a lot of church projects, which didn’t really rock my boat that much. There was just too much ‘church stuff’ going on there for my taste.  Then I found this one woman who was running backyard creche’s and thought, okay, well I’ll start with her. Then I met my partner, Ulpha Robertson, who grew up in the anti-apartheid times in SA and he had a very strong connection to communities. She used to teach herself and she was teaching in teacher’s colleges so, she really had the knowledge and love for her country. I guess, what I could add was a little bit of ‘can do’ approach of newly arrived, still thinking we can change things and together we’ve been working for the last 20 years.

Did you start, as you say, with one backyard creche and the progression to where you are today?

So, I did one and then as I was supporting the next one, I met Ulpha and persuaded her to do 10 with me so, that was our benchmark. Along the way, I don’t remember, there was 7 or 8, it was the late 90’s where the government was still saying let’s eat beetroot and sweet potatoes. There was a huge stigma attached and we just felt, we can’t change that but we do have to help the children. Then, as a consequence, we built an orphanage for HIV infected babies, that was actually a mistake. We found that a lot of the mother were then dropping the children on our doorstep and the children were used to being sick and poor, but they were not used to not having their mommies. So, actually, we weren’t helping at all. We had the best intentions but we weren’t really having a positive impact.

Then we thought about it and we said, actually, what’s needed is to keep the mothers alive. I think civil organisations like ours have always played a huge role in SA. They have always filled the gap where Government could have done more. I still feel very German. I feel a guest in SA, I love my life there but I don’t think I should just the bigger political context. What I can see is that schools work really hard to give children an education. It’s very hard for those teachers, headmistresses, and headmasters in the township schools to educate a child. They have so many challenges, from multiple languages, from still children not being able to go to school – being called away. So, I do have respect of how they manage their school life.

For its part, Yabonga works to support the State’s efforts at both the pre-school level of children, and with those pupils who attend classes. Here’s how they do it.

The children would usually come from very poor and dysfunctional family environments. So, they would wake up at home, but home will be usually somebody drunk in the family and in a very neglected environment. They would then go to school, and after school they would go straight to the community mother, who’s in a walkable distance from the school. When the child arrives at the community mother, he or she can start doing her homework, or doing a little bit of a drawing, until the rest of the group arrives. Now, a group is usually 25 children, and they will then start quite a structured afternoon program.

The program will usually start with a check-in, how’s your day been, how you’re feeling today, and depending on the day, this will be slightly more contemplative, or it could be dancing and slightly more fun and upbeat. The afternoon will always include a session, which is psychosocial support so, there’ll be a support group dedicated to a certain topic. A topic could be, let’s say, around HIV, talking about HIV in the family. It could be talking about a loss in the family, somebody who has died, and coping strategies – how do deal with that. It could be around the rights of the children, ‘what are my rights and how should I be treated in a family?’ Just very basic values that the children would now know if they’ve been in an abusive and dysfunctional family environment.

How do you fund all of this?

Our funding comes from the European NGOs that have funded over the last 20-years. So, we have an NGO in Austria, in Germany, in the UK, and in Holland. Any Pound that we raise goes directly to the programs because we have the admin funded through a more closer family environment ourselves. Also, we try to get co-financing from the governments for private funds that are raised so, these funds are really leveraged very highly. Then we get some money from Governments. The global fund is the European Funding, US Aids, and also some departments in SA, such as the City of CT, the Department of Social Services, and also some SA corporates, some social foundations and private funders.

So, there are community mothers – how many of them are there?

We have 42 community mothers, who look after 25 children each so, in total, it’s a pretty easy number of 1,000 children, at the moment.

How do you select the mothers and the children?

 The mothers are usually recruited from our circles of support, which are support groups that we run for adults, and we build a relationship with these women, and get to know their home environment. They have to have a home that they make available for these children. Often, it is a shack adjacent to their RDP homes or it could be that they just empty a lounge. They need to be a mommy and they need to want to look after these children, cook for them, and just be a sort of a foster mum. They will get supported in psychosocial support and academic support through our gap year students and the child counsellors.

How does that work?

So, these would have been usually children that grow up through our programs. Sometimes they start when they’re 9 or 13. Then they would finish school, usually hopefully by matric, and then just not have figured out what they want to do afterwards. So, we have a year-long program where we train these children at leadership camps and to help them figure out what their strengths are and what they want to after school. At the same time, we pay them a little stipend to do homework with our children and to look after the younger ones, and they usually really, rise to the occasion because they become role models for the younger ones. They are proud that they have graduated from being a child that’s been looked after and that they can turn into the person that now looks after the younger ones. It really is very touching to see and it’s a win-win.

And the selection of the children themselves?

The children all come from the communities where our Yabonga women live themselves so, we have very strong connections to the local clinics, where the HIV and ARVs are handed out. So, often we would be referred to children that are on medication or where the clinic staff knows that family members have been affected recently. We also work with the schools, where we run a lot of awareness and training around HIV and Aids and also support groups for let’s say, girls from 14 to 16, around ‘sugar daddy’ issues, where girls have relationships with older men who are often infected with HIV, just for a pair of shoes or for a lift to town.

How’s it changed your life, being involved in this?

I think it’s just part of me. I don’t think it has changed me. It’s always made me very thoughtful about how diverse life is, and about my own judgements of what is happiness and what is content, and what am I assuming about things that make a life worthwhile because I pickup so many things that I benefit from. If I watch an afternoon program happening, just as an example. I can walk in, unannounced, into a group where you can just cut the air with a knife because you can just feel they are talking about deep issues of losing family members, disease, and just deep stuff. Then, ‘boof’ – somebody claps their hand and they go outside and they sing and they dance with only the power of their own voices. They clap and they drum and they are deeply happy and they are able to release all this heavy psychological stuff, through the power of their own movement and release in their own bodies and I watch them, and I’m like ‘wow’ I can learn so much from that.

So, it hasn’t really changed me but it’s been part of my own development and maintenance, and keeping myself normal, whatever that means.

Normal? Well, not by most yardsticks. Inspirational? Yes. Exceptional? Also, yes. Ursel Barnes and her four-dozen township housemothers of Yabonga, have been quietly making a difference in thousands of young lives for two decades. That’s something worth celebrating but hardly normal.

This has been the Rational Perspective. I’m Alec Hogg, until the next time, cheerio.