Mohau Children’s Centre is conveniently situated on the premises of Pretoria’s Kalafong Hospital in Atteridgeville. Apart for two of the children housed there, all are HIV+ and receiving ARV-treatment. The house is well kept and organized. I was met by Miranda and she took me through the facility.

The facility is on three levels; ground level is for administration offices, first floor for the boys and second floor for the girls and the crèche.

The facility has many benefactors, including the university of Pretoria, whose students recently visited and decorated the walls of the kids’ rooms with bright colors and fairy tale characters. They also donated paintings that now hang in the corridors.

The staff of 26 includes nursing sisters that see to the children’s medical needs and 2 teachers that assist at the crèche and help with homework in the afternoons. In addition to the basic care of these children, they also have to counsel them on ways to deal with their disease. Many of them struggle to come to terms with the idea that they have an incurable illness and, similar to those children at Bakwena House, they worry that they are different and that people will treat them differently…thinking that they are ‘tainted’.

According to Miranda, these children are quite healthy, despite their disease and they lost only two youngsters last year. Deaths are caused mostly by immune deficiencies – one of the children that passed away had cancer in addition to the HIV/Aids and the other one simply had no resistance to withstand a second attack of meningitis.

It saddens me to think that these young people may not have a long and prosperous life ahead of them. One wishes to give them every opportunity and, I’m sure, the people of Mohau try their best to make the life they are given a good and happy one. There is, after all, still hope that someday, someone will find a cure…..and then this borrowed life will be a mere memory, a life lesson that they can teach their children’s children….a lesson to value each moment we are given on earth.

Follow this link to Mohau Children's Centre on the web