God's Golden Acre

Introduction

In 1993 on a trip to Uganda, South African Heather Reynolds turned a corner that would change her life forever. Heather was visiting a remote part of the country, and she encountered by chance the human and social devastation the AIDS pandemic leaves in its wake.

She came face to face with the worst scourge to afflict mankind since the medieval plagues, and one that has destroyed the lives of millions of children. As she got out of her car at a small settlement to get water from a spring, she met a group of children, the orphaned victims of AIDS. Here she witnessed their misery and terror as they awaited death by starvation, uncared for by adults.

Some years before that day, Heather Reynolds had given her life to God but was waiting for the call to serve Him. At that moment she knew this was his call.

Slowly, she knelt down in the native hut and looked upon a little boy covered by a dirty sack. His parents had either abandoned him, or they themselves had died. He was spending his last hours alone and uncared for.

The African child and the white woman could not communicate because of the barrier of language. As the boy lay still, waiting for death, the look in his eyes stills haunts Heather, even though, in later years, she has encountered many more young AIDS victims, some of whom have died in her arms.

She promised God she would live, for the rest of her life if necessary, by serving Him in the cause of caring for, and nursing, babies and children orphaned by the AIDS pandemic. Heather decided she would use her life savings to provide shelter for orphaned children.
Earlier, she had taken in pregnant girls to work in her pottery in the 1980’s, and also provided sanctuary for youngsters left homeless as a result of the civil disorder in KwaZulu-Natal during the decade of transition to majority rule in 1994.

Now, believing they were answering God’s call, Heather and her husband Patrick Reynolds, a well known sculptor, filled their home at Wartburg, in KwaZulu-Natal, with sick and abandoned children. They called their little community God’s Golden Acre. From there, in 1999, God’s Golden Acre moved on to become a cluster of foster homes at Cato Ridge, a few miles away.

Built on the top of a hill, it is near to the Valley of a Thousand Hills, a vast rural area between Durban and Pietermaritzberg. Approximately 95 children, between the ages of a few months and 16 years of age, live in the community.

Most of Heather’s children are healthy. Many HIV-positive babies die before their first birthday, few make it beyond their fourth. God’s Golden Acre is designed as a sanctuary to allow this small minority to die with dignity in a loving environment, and as a family home for the surviving children, who are well fed, cheerful, confident, and attend the best local state schools. Then there is a series of rural outreach programs for thousands of orphans who are living in extended families in the Valley of a Thousand Hills. Heather’s teams of staff and volunteers distribute basic food supplies to the ad hoc families she has helped to create, many headed by an elderly ‘granny’ figure, or a teenage girl. The teams supply rice, salt, mealy-meal, samp, beans, and other basic foodstuffs.

Each day they rub shoulders with death, gaze upon the expressionless faces of the abused, and sometimes encounter both hostility and resentment. Heather drives her familiar Land Rover alone into remote countryside to visit the sick and dying, offering comfort and prayer, and rescuing children. To many of the Zulus in the Valley of a Thousand Hills, Heather has become known as Mawethu, which means Our Mother, or “Gogo” our ‘gran’.

Within the whole of southern Africa, KwaZulu-Natal has the greatest number of HIV/AIDS cases. Thirty-six percent of its people were recorded infected in 2000, eight percent higher than in the capital province of Gauteng. Fifty five percent of TB cases in KwaZulu-Natal were infected with HIV/AIDS, as were thirty-seven percent of its pregnant women, and eighty percent of its prostitutes.

Many believe this tragic situation is an appalling legacy from the country’s advanced motorway network – unique in Africa - that opened up the vast rural hinterland thirty years ago. Initially these new road networks brought greater prosperity to a land blessed with natural resources, and a diversity of climates, to produce food and wine. Later they became the arteries through which the virus multiplied itself.

The drivers of the great juggernauts, away from home sometimes for weeks, travelling into and out of South Africa, use the services of the army of sex workers who can be found waiting for them at gas stations or walking along the verges of the highways. The men become infected with the HIV virus and then bring it home with them to the rural areas - with deadly consequences. Similarly, young men from areas such as the Valley of a Thousand Hills can only find work in the towns and cities and migrate there – returning occasionally to infect those that they love. It is an endless cycle fuelled by ignorance, and sometimes indifference. In these stricken lands of the AIDS pandemic, where murder, hijack, and robbery is common, it is mostly grandmothers and older siblings who are left to cope with the responsibility of bringing up the family’s children. Their own deceased offspring, the working adult generation, have disappeared, victims of the virus.

These extended families are impoverished, and the gogos (grandmothers) who run them find it increasingly difficult to provide for their young ones. Only a few have piped water to their home, electricity, fuel or opportunities for employment - factors which make it more difficult for the small groups to survive. Failing health and almost non-existent medical facilities further add to the seriousness of the situation. Adolescent girls are vulnerable to rape and abuse by adults.

The South African state is making grants available to the needy child-led families in the valleys, but the bureaucracy that supports their distribution to genuine claimants tries in vain to process a huge backlog. In the end the grants seem inaccessible to the largely uneducated people in the remote areas.

Much of the help the children receive is dependent upon individuals like Heather, working with the support of other non-government organizations, and a patchwork of charities that include the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation, Rotary clubs, Hope HIV and, a London-based network of South Africans called Starfish, founded by Anthony Farr, who spent nine months at God’s Golden Acre.

His charity draws on the donations of expatriates working in London, who are being paid in sterling. Many Dutch charitable foundations have also been extremely supportive of God’s Golden Acre.

However, until recently Heather has been alone in her task. Yet it is only because of the total commitment to her work that she has been able to establish sufficient trust and respect within these desperate communities to bring relief to the needy. As she has continued walking her lonely path in the Valley of a Thousand Hills, it is the world that has come to find her.
Heather has received growing news media coverage in all of South Africa’s major papers, in British newspapers like The Guardian, and in television broadcasts in South Africa, and on the BBC, ABC, CNN and Norwegian TV news.

The scale of what Heather has achieved over a number of years has come to the attention of both Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The international press is now becoming aware of the significance of Heather’s work. She is a mother figure to thousands of children.

In 2002 the American broadcasting star, Oprah Winfrey, visited God’s Golden Acre and brought film crews to the valley. Deeply moved by what she found, Oprah Winfrey arranged for her private Foundation to fund projects both at God’s Golden Acre and a rural outreach project.

Lucy Foster was one of the first European volunteer workers to arrive at God’s Golden Acre in 2000 when she was nineteen years old.

“You will find ninety-seven happy children - Heather is responsible for most of them being alive and for them being well-adjusted children with strong hopes for the future. Many of the orphans now go to very good schools thanks to sponsorship. In the valley there are thousands more people whose lives have been touched by her through the rural outreach programs.
Heather now has pilot projects – such as the Strategic National Action Plan (SNAP) and the Child Sponsorship Program that could make a major contribution to fighting the effects of the AIDS pandemic in South Africa. We all pray that those who have the power politically will help her to make it happen, and that the general public in all countries will get to hear about what she is doing, and give her support.

“Her faith in God, and her journey through the years with Him, is part of the story of an amazing life that will surely appeal to people of all religions throughout the world, whether Muslim, Jew, Hindu, or Buddhist. She is the personification, in our era, of the Good Samaritan.”

Alan McCarthy, chairman of God’s Golden Acre, shares Heather’s strength of faith, conviction and belief in miracles.

“I know many people who walk closely with God - and wonderful miracles happen because God can use them as a channel. It’s not their own power, and they will be the first to say that. So they are not performing the miracles. Heather is no better or worse than most average people – but she is allowing God to use her, trying to let God guide her. When she prays she allows God’s power to flow into the situation - so it’s not Heather, it’s God.”

In a special Christmas television program on the AIDS Pandemic in South Africa, in which she pledged to devote the rest of her life to the cause and interests of its orphans, American TV star Oprah Winfrey told millions of shocked viewers that a child is orphaned through AIDS in South Africa every fourteen seconds – during the hour long program two hundred and fifty seven children would be orphaned.

“Many of us are really just not aware of the challenges so many children face. My life was changed when I saw first-hand the devastation that AIDS is having on the lives of children and families in South Africa, as well as other parts of the world.

The AIDS Pandemic has become the defining moral issue of our time. For children, many of them already devastatingly poor, who are now left motherless, there is no question, no question at all, that we have to help them right now. We are human beings sharing the planet with other human beings, and we cannot continue to ignore one of the greatest crises facing humanity in our lifetime.”

As Oprah Winfrey discovered, during this visit to a world so far from her own, there are people like Heather Reynolds out there in rural South Africa who care, whose lives are literally a story of triumph in adversity.