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This book charts a remarkable woman’s engagement with deep rural communities in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province – and in particular with the high numbers of brain-damaged children left stranded in huts all over the foothills of the great Drakensberg Mountains.
Greg Margolis (founder of NYPD Security) was for decades intimately involved in dealing with ‘random victims’ of crime or conflict, whether the victim was an individual, a family or even someone close to the victim(s), in many instances if they could, they often chose to leave the country ‒ this included the vast majority of Greg's extended family.
But Greg embodied the antithesis of a victim mentality – and chose to stay in SA, founding a non-profit security company in the late 90's, which then later expanded and evolved into a commercial security service provider in Johannesburg.
When Esther Alm and her husband settled in Bulwer in the South African province of KwaZulu Natal in 1980 they immediately began to explore their environment. They had spent holidays in the area before - and had already climbed Mahwaqa (Bulwer mountain) several times. Esther writes: 'From those early days right up to my last climb in 2010, I kept dated records of what we saw and experienced. When I looked at these records again, I could calculate that I had climbed to the summit of the mountain over 600 times in the nearly 30 years I lived in Bulwer.'
Many thousands of South African children are brought up by their grandmothers. This is one of the many manifestations of an unstable and distraught society, where the mother to child bond is too often broken, causing pain and a deep-seated sense of loss to both parties. Each Gogo-raised child’s story is different, but the general theme is the same: it deals with abandonment, with only qualified acceptance, but most of all with the simple absence of a real mother presence. The title of Vanessa Neo Mathope’s book – Orphaned, with Living Parents – tells it all. A monstrous imbalance has occurred, and the consequences run deep.
