Around the world there are incredible individuals going about their daily business and making a huge difference to their community. Here at jorg&olif we pause to step into Sister Abigail’s shoes, who is known by everyone in Underberg, a town in Durban beneath South Africa’s Southern Drakensberg Mountains.
In her seventies, Sister Abigail Ntleko received an “Unsung Heroes of Compassion” award in 2009 from His Holiness the Dalai Lama in San Francisco. En route, she stopped off in London where we heard her incredible life story told with heart-warming humour and feistiness.
Abigail was born in KwaZulu/Natal in 1934 where her mother died when she was three. Her father was against education for girls, so she became a herd-girl for his cattle, yet Abigail was adamant that she wanted to learn to read and write. She rebelled against her father with the encouragement of her missionary church’s Sunday school teacher and enrolled herself into the first year of school at the age of 14, despite the taunts amongst her much younger classmates. Over the next two decades Abigail qualified as a nurse.
When the hospitals were taken over by the apartheid government in the 1970s, Abigail moved to work in community-orientated activities and was eventually posted to Underberg. Abigail began rescuing and adopting abandoned children who she encountered on her work. She built a house for them to live in, and cajoled her family into looking after her children whilst she worked to support them.
In 1984, Abigail began seeing patients with puzzling symptoms and sent them to hospital. The HIV/AIDS virus had arrived. Alarmed by the threat to her children, Abigail began raising awareness farm to farm about the virus, speaking wherever she could from church services to funerals. She inspired her local community into action and mobilised volunteers to provide home-based care for the terminally ill and assist with the swell of orphans at a time when there were no social workers in the area.
Abigail would be on hand in the middle of night to deal with the deaths and still takes in the children who are dumped on the doorstep of the clinic. By 1990 she had personally adopted 22 children, with many more under her wing.
Retiring from the Department of Health, she took on management of the Children’s Centre. Her passion inspired international visitors who now provide vital funding to support her efforts through a UK branch of Clouds of Hope. With the support of an American benefactor she aided the building of cottages to home the children, and developed vegetable gardens, tended chickens and built laundry facilities as well as a schoolroom and sickbay for the fragile children.
Even in her elderly age, she still has the same vitality and dedication, and is “up at dawn, fresh and raring to go” and is always the last to bed after tucking all the children into bed.
If you would like to reflect more, read Stephanie Nolen’s incredibly informative and deeply moving book, 28 Stories of AIDS in Africa, which follows more individual human stories.
