?Tapalogo?
Directed by Gabriela and Sally Gutierrez Dewar

?Tapalogo? is a sensitively made documentary film; it weaves the stories of women in Freedom Park, South Africa?s illegal squatter settlement in the North West Province, and shows how they have risen from their condition of economic degradation to become catalysts for personal and social transformation and healing.

The film was born out of the co-directors? active support in the late 1980s of the anti-apartheid movement. And it was on their 1992 travel to South Africa to witness the great political changes of the country when they met its leaders like Walter Sisulu and Catholic Bishop Kevin Dowling.

The latter eventually co-founded Tapalogo, a network of women who began fighting against AIDS as home-based carers for their community. This struggle is at the heart of the film?s compassionate and clear-eyed seeing.

The co-directors? visual language narrates the stories of some of the women in Tapalogo, and records the ways in which former sex workers infected with HIV begin to understand the economic roots of the pandemic, and learn how to turn the devastating health problem into a commitment to serve others in the community. With the help of retired nurses, doctors, social workers and religious leaders, Tapalogo?s women undergo educational-skills training in home-based care.

Humanitarian meditation

The concept of home-based care is to provide a human link for the HIV-infected patient, who would be otherwise isolated and left alone to further degenerate and die.

Tapalogo?s home-based carers conduct regular visits to the shacks of HIV-infected women in Freedom Park who are unable to care for themselves and their children. When these women need to be brought to the clinic for closer supervision, the carers do the task of transporting them to the Tapalogo clinic.

One touching scene allows us to accompany former sex worker Thembi to the hovel of a very sick woman. Thembi, a Tapalogo carer and an assistant nurse, talks to this patient and enters the space, gets on her knees and prepares the food for the patient so when the patient?s stomach is full, she can then drink her anti-retrovirals.

For the carer, the work can even include cleaning up the patient?s shack, washing the dirty linoleum-covered floor and the plastic food containers, feeding the patient and then checking whether the medicines have been taken on a regular basis.

Were it not for Tapalogo?s humanitarian work and mediation, Thembi herself would have lost the opportunity to be part of the fight against AIDS, lost the chance to heal, and lost the real chance of being of service to other women.

Blind generalization

Selina, a sex worker in Freedom Park, gives her own analysis on why women like her ended up as sex workers. Her story is specific and personal, and yet it is also indicative of the situation that thousands of black women in South Africa who suffer from gender inequality find themselves in.

In the mire of poverty in the big city, destitute and desperate women live in illegal shack settlements like Freedom Park, which are located near the platinum mines where the men work. These women who cannot find decent work are most often pushed into prostitution as the only way of earning their keep and having the means for their basic survival.
Like Selina, these sex workers are exposed to HIV, especially from their sex partners who refuse to wear condoms.

Given that the pandemic affects so many lives, Bishop Dowling questions the official position of the Church toward AIDS and sexuality in the African context. He thinks blind generalizations in the application of the hardline position against the use of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS have proven to be dangerous to the health of women and men in African communities.

Dowling says the Church?s ethics and moral theology need to be grounded on reality, in the way he has to confront reality when he visits the shack of an HIV-infected woman.

Healing effects

For this radical stance, Bishop Dowling had suffered ostracism from higher officials of the Church. But his work with Tapalogo continues to be the ground from which his outspoken thoughts grow. And the healing effects of the work of Tapalogo on the lives of the women in Freedom Park give more than hard evidence for the validity of his position.

The film captures the Tapalogo spirit, which is upbeat and powerfully rendered in the songs the women sing in their community circle, all of them caught up in the rhythm of the body swaying to the song.

One of these women is Gladys, a retired 66-year-old nurse who is a supervisor in a Tapalogo clinic. We see her visit her patients in their shacks and talks to them as a friend who can teach them how to do things properly so that they can help themselves.

The film is not the usual exposition of the fates of South African women who suffer from AIDS. The HIV-infected women are their own story?s protagonists, not weaklings rendered inutile by the disease, or victims of circumstances. The film doesn?t gloss over the degradation poverty brings. Instead of being defeated in the squalor, the women of Tapalogo demonstrate that the spirit of community, the solidarity that brings them together in service of others, is a way of inner strength and hope.

Carer Nondomiso speaks for them all when she says with a smile that lights up her face: ?I have so much hope!?