PHELOPHEPA - THE PRIMARY HEALTH CARE TRAIN

A few personal comments from the photographer

This is a personal gallery – in neither word nor image does it presume to speak on behalf of anyone other than myself, or even to “report” on this extraordinary venture of practical humanity. This sense of personal association with the Phelophepa health care train derives from, amongst others, a very personal circumstance.

Roche, a research-oriented healthcare group which has been one of the Transnet Foundation’s main partners from the very beginning, announced some time after my visit to the train that their plans would include adding two new clinics, one for diabetes and one for oncology.

As it happens, very shortly before I joined the train for a week, I was diagnosed with fairly serious Type II diabetes. For a week my camera and I walked about the train, went out with outreach teams, sat, stood, leaned, squatted quietly and watched... and sometimes captured. But my perception, as I got closer and closer to the people, increasingly became informed by my own diagnosis. And when our hands touched, my pink-soft skin reading the brail in the cracked hardness of their lives, the uninhibited acceptance in their eyes evidenced their preparedness to share. Some seven months later (my diabetes by then under control), I started working on sifting and classifying and packaging the many images from that week. I had hardly started this process when I was diagnosed again, this time with cancer, and my understanding of what these quiet, generous, dignified people could teach me deepened further.

It is now time to include the Phelophepa people in my memories. 

Lillian. Dr Lillian Cingo. The Train Manager. A human being who, like so many of her contemporaries, could not have been born from a continent less vast than Africa, a woman whose unequivocal  strength was moulded in the softness of ubuntu, of that unshakeable generosity which her generation had grown from decades, indeed centuries, of denial and struggle. But she’d be the first to plead that this was not about her. It is about the team she, and no doubt others around her, have gathered, professional and support personnel alike. It is about their unmitigated commitment which guides large numbers of students of every race, background and belief through two weeks of participation, and then launches them into their individual professional lives – changed forever. It is about gathering people from the local communities, training them, employing them constructively, and nurturing in them a dignity and self-belief from which they and their communities would benefit for years. And it is ultimately about those who need them, those whose health and quality of  life are reinforced by them...  those whose hands they hold when, for the first time, they feel the gentle shadow of mortality.

What a privilege to have shared a week with the people of Phelophepa. What a gift to have shared a moment of life with the burghers of Letsitele.

Pierre du Toit
2006

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