Poverty, abuse and a forced arranged marriage could not keep Dr Thandeka Mazibuko from a dream of healing her community.T E X T A N D P H O T O G RA P H S BY G LY N I S H O R N I N G

HEALING THROUGH

HURT

Mazibuko studied medicine while also raising her son, Sphume, as a single mother

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Thandeka Mazibuko has swapped her white doctor’s coat and stethoscope for a T-shirt and paintbrush. But even slapping paint on a rundown building in the rugged Valley of a Thousand Hills outside Durban, South Africa, she cuts a striking figure.

It’s not just the chiselled cheeks and exotic braids, it’s the passion the youthful 37-year-old exudes. “This place represents what I have been fighting for all my life,” Mazibuko says simply, “The f irst rural KwaZulu-Natal cancer care centre, providing life-saving screening for my community.”

They crowd around her, eager youths to grey-haired gogos (an older woman or grandmother), fixing windows and plastering walls to bring new life to the disused offices the tribal chiefs have given to her to use as a cancer clinic. The region, which has great natural beauty, has severe social problems such as unemployment, and a high level of HIV/AIDS infections.

“This doctor was born here and has come back for us,” says a schoolgirl roasting corn cobs on a brazier nearby. “She does not sit behind a city desk expecting patients to go to her. She comes to us, because she says it’s too

late when we are smelling and infested with worms like some women she sees. She is my hero, my role model.”

Mazibuko was the first black student accepted to study radiation oncology at the Nelson R. Mandela Medical School at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Today she is an oncology registrar at Grey’s Hospital in Pieter-maritzburg, and founder of Sinomusa-nothando Community Development, a non-governmental organisation advocating for cancer awareness. She won the 2012 Businesswomen’s Asso-ciation of South Africa Achiever Award for Social Entrepreneurship by raising cancer awareness through mobile clinics in remote rural areas.

“It is a long journey back to where I started,” she says, wiping the paint from her hands. “As a child I wanted to be a doctor to heal people I watched dying from preventable, manageable diseases like tuberculosis,

hypertension and cancer – especially cervical cancer; it carries so many women away.”

Her school had no science facilities, so Mazibuko taught herself from old study guides. When her school burned down, her single mother sent her to live with an aunt and uncle near another school, and Mazibuko cooked, cleaned and babysat for her board.

Her uncle was a pastor in a fundamentalist church and frowned on her ambitions – for him, a woman’s place was at home, serving her husband. Mazibuko was not allowed

Transforming buildings – and lives: Mazibuko and a helper at work

Mazibuko matches

traditional garb with an AIDS

awareness T-shirt

Her school had no science

facilities, so she taught herself from old study

guides

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even to talk to boys, but at 17 developed a secret crush on a student at a univer-sity fellowship group where her uncle preached. When her aunt took her aside one afternoon, she feared she had found out. “It was far worse,” she sighs. “She had found me a husband.”

He was a wealthy young doctor who would help them live comfortable lives, but she was not attracted to him and refused to marry: “I wanted to be a doctor, not a doctor’s wife,” she explains. Her family ignored her pleas and protests and accepted the doctor’s lobola (bride price) of 11 cows. At 17 Thandeka was married, and at 19 gave birth to a son with a rare pituitary condition requiring expensive treatment. “I loved him, and his illness made me more resolved to be a doctor.”

Between working as her husband’s

Here she found herself in fierce new fights – for student funding, for a divorce, and for the life of her sickly son. “I had sleepless nights in hospital wards and ICU, trying to study while watching over him. I cried. I prayed. Sometimes I despaired. But each setback made me stronger.”

Mazibuko was awarded bursaries and loans, her husband eventually accepted the divorce, and her son slowly stabilised. She returned to Durban to study medicine, and was visiting her ill grand-mother in the Valley of a Thou-sand Hills when the old woman died in her arms. “The hospital was too far and the ambulance would not come to this place. I knew I had to find ways to stop others dying like her. She was only discovered to be diabetic after her death. She was always so busy with work for the church, and it struck me that if screening was done in churches or at pension payout sites, her condi-tion could have been detected early.”

That’s when Mazibuko started Sinomusanothando. “It means ‘We have love and generosity’,” she says. “I wanted to thank God for my qualifying as a doctor, and to motivate others to do the same and to go back to their villages and make a differ-ence. We are needed.”

She began by helping orphanages during her internship at Prince Mshiyeni Memorial Hospital in

Durban, collecting money from staff for parties for the sick children, and eventually registered Sinomusano-thando as an NGO in 2007. The organisation holds health awareness rallies in remote, neglected communi-ties, giving talks on cervical, breast and prostate cancers and HIV/AIDS.

“Approaching the tribal chiefs in these areas to make arrangements is not easy as a woman, even if I am a doctor. I am automatically seen as inferior, and they have kept me wait-ing for hours outside and refused to meet me, but I have persisted and prevailed,” she says.

Mazibuko “begs or borrows” marquees for the rallies, once flying

PA and waiting on her in-laws, she studied secretly for her school leaving certificate. She pretended to be taking driving lessons but instead sat her exams and she passed well enough to be accepted to study medicine. Then she packed her young son and a few necessities in one of her husband’s cars, and fled hundreds of kilometres across the country to the University of the North (now Limpopo).

Mazibuko speaks at a Sinomusanothando health awareness rally

Many diseases seen in the remote rural communities are preventable

“I cried. I prayed.

Sometimes I despaired. But

each setback made me stronger”

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to Pretoria at her own expense to negotiate some from the military. In these she gives educational talks on medical conditions traditionally con-sidered too intimate to be discussed in public.

“When I talk about prostate cancer, I tell men how to examine their ‘potatoes’,” Mazibuko smiles ruefully. After the talks, she conducts one-on-one consultations for people with symptoms, with a team of final year medical students and volunteer doctors. She also negotiates support from other organisations and arranges for government departments to have representatives present to sort out people’s grant and pension problems in “one-stop wellness shops” she hopes to roll out nationally some day.

“Growing up, I saw how barriers of language and culture cause misun-derstanding of sickness and poor

compliance with treatment,” she says. “My dream was to have rural communities educated about health and treated in a way they understand, and given accessible, affordable hea lthcare. My family didn’t understand me, my in-laws mocked me, my lecturers told me to quit because I wouldn’t cope. But I never doubted myself.”

The building she is painting today is part of that. “The only thing that I’m prouder of is my son,” she confides, fondly watching Sphume wielding a camera. Now 18, and with his pituitary condition well in control, he has become the Sinomusanothando photographer.

“I tell my son he must write his own future,” Mazibuko says, putting an arm around him. “Don’t ever let others do it for you. And don’t ever stop dreaming!” !

P A T E N T L Y A B S U R D I N V E N T I O N S

While the arrival of the telephone and penicillin changed the world, other inventions registered with the UK Patent O!ce haven’t really caught on…

" An ashtray that warns you to quit smoking. The verbal lecture is activated when you pick up the box of matches.

" A horse-powered minibus. The horse walks along an endless conveyor-belt treadmill in the middle of the bus.

" A ladder to enable spiders to climb out of a bath. This comprises a thin latex rubber strip that follows the inner contours of the tub.

" Piping snow and ice balls from Antarctica to irrigate the Australian desert. The patent suggests that this will solve the world famine problem.

" An umbrella to wear on the head, designed to not mess the wearer’s hair.

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