Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - June 10, 2001
Ranjeni Munusamy

That was two years ago. Now, by her own admission, the 37-year-old woman is a Catholic nun with spunk.

"People always get shocked by the things I say. I tell them that they should know better than me about sex and how to prevent getting Aids because, hey, I'm Catholic and I pray most of the time."

Sister Immaculate, a Franciscan Nardini nun, is an unusual person doing extraordinary work in an extraordinary place. She is part of a convent based at the Maria Ratschitz Mission near Wasbank, in northern KwaZulu-Natal, where she is preaching a new religion in an area that is in social and economic free fall.

While the Aids infection rate in other parts of northern KwaZulu-Natal has been estimated to be among the highest in the world, no proper statistics are available for the areas around Ladysmith, Newcastle and Dundee. The area is already in a state of economic depression due to a lack of jobs and investment. The only gauge of how the disease is eating away at the social fibre of the district is the regularity of funerals.

About three years ago, the Catholic diocese of Dundee realised that Aids was crippling the region and, because of the inadequate health facilities there, decided to restore the abandoned and run-down Maria Ratschitz Mission to set up an Aids hospice.

The mission is tucked away at the bottom of the Hlatikhulu mountain, and all that can be seen from the long, dusty road leading to it is a steeple poking through the trees. At the end of the road is a little corner of heaven.

When one enters the Church of Our Lady of Sorrows, one can almost hear the angels depicted in the colourful murals on the walls and the ceiling sing. One feels an instinctive need to genuflect in the sacred place.

The church is surrounded by quaint stone buildings and little flower beds. A double-storey building with a thatched roof and wrought-iron railings serves as the hospice. It is so enchanting in its fairyland appearance that it makes one wish one could go there to die.

In this primitive paradise named as a place of sorrow, the paradox unfolds. It is here that Catholic nuns help communities overcome the stigma of Aids, teach them to look after their dying, hold the hands of those who have no one to do so and empower young minds about sex and sexuality.

Sister Irmingard, a medical doctor, started the hospice in 1999 to take in mainly terminally ill Aids patients. "She wanted the hospice opened because it was clear then that, because of the high rate of infection in these areas, there will be many HIV-positive people who will be rejected by their communities and would need to be taken care of," says Sister Immaculate.

Most people who come to the mission don't know they have Aids or don't inform the nuns that they are HIV-positive. They come because they are desperate and dying, and because they have no one to take care of them. "One lady was about to die here, and she was screaming that people were saying that she had Aids. Her mother told her that it was not true. She told her that she had the flu."

To overcome the stigma and rejection, the nuns run workshops to teach communities about Aids, counselling and home-based care. The mission also runs peer-to-peer education programmes.

The Department of Health has no similar initiatives in the area and has merely encouraged the mission to continue with its work.

"Many of our people really don't know Aids - they don't understand it. This place can also not accommodate many people, which is why the training on home-based care is so important," says Sister Immaculate.

Most of the patients who are brought in are kept in the hospice until their families are able to take care of them or until they are well enough to go home. But, since the mission opened in 1999, more than 30 people have died there.

"This is not an easy job, even if you're a trained nurse. Sometimes one person will die in the morning and another in the evening. You have to constantly come to terms with death."

Sister Immaculate is not a nurse but a teacher. She came to the mission because she thought she would be able to teach children at an adjoining school. But her former job as a primary school teacher was at a private school, and the government would not recognise her qualifications or experience. She created her own niche at the mission by developing and running training programmes after attending courses on issues relating to Aids and sex.

"It was so embarrassing the first time I had to handle a condom."

But 92% of South Africans who are HIV-positive are infected through sex, and for Sister Immaculate there was no escaping this uncomfortable feeling. While all forms of birth control are prohibited by the church, Sister Immaculate says prophylactics are options to prevent the transmission of the HI virus and therefore cannot be ignored.

Her radical sex-education workshops initially stunned the simple rural folk but have proved so popular that she was invited to train teachers from all the schools in the Ladysmith district to be able to counsel learners. She was also invited this week to address an international conference on Aids in Tanzania hosted by UNAIDS.

So what exactly does a Catholic nun teach about sex?

"The first thing is to teach the youth the difference between love and sex. Most of them don't know what love is because children are not taught about it. They don't understand the purpose of sex. They think that once you fall in love, the next thing to do is to have sex with that person."

Love and sex are separate concepts and are not necessarily related, she says.

Sister Immaculate has adapted the Department of Health's ABC philosophy, replacing "condomise" with "change your lifestyle". She also takes workshop participants through a process of identifying the advantages and disadvantages of abstaining from sex and being faithful to one partner.

"I show them that they have options and choices. But when it comes to the condoms story, I say, 'People, it's completely up to you.' The problem is that most people know so little about condoms - they don't know how to use one and don't know that it's not 100%-safe."

Her knowledge of condoms is remarkable. "It has to be kept at 25 C - not hotter or colder. Some people keep it in their back pockets. With the body temperature at 36 C, and if you keep a condom made of pure rubber against your body, of course it's going to break when you use it." She says condoms should have special lubricants, and that, since the average 15-year-old boy cannot afford to buy these expensive products, they improvise with Vaseline, hand lotion or cooking oil. These also cause condoms to burst.

"Condoms have natural pores and the size is equal to five microns in the latex rubber. Sperm is three to five microns and therefore can get through. And the [HI] virus is 0.1 microns. Unless you use condoms made from the wood on this table, the virus is going to get through, my dear," she says, banging her fists on the table to emphasise her point.

It's no wonder that people who attend her workshops are always so shocked.

"I say to them that I am a nun standing in front of you and I am the one having to tell you all this."

Philani Ndlovu, a Dannhauser youth activist, says the response from young people has been phenomenal.

"The church is coming out strongly and is really on its own in running Aids education programmes here. The Health Department and politicians have no real messages that get through to the youth.

"What is effective is the way the workshops are run and what is discussed. When a person dies, the cause of death is not talked about because people are afraid. The workshops teach how to deal with Aids in the community. They also teach love, loyalty, abstinence and safer sex.

"Where else would people here learn these sorts of things?" asks Ndlovu.

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