THE GREAT GRANNY REVOLUTION

The Wakefield Grannies are hell-bent on changing the world for ten elderly women in South Africa who are raising grandchildren orphaned by AIDS.

The 11 women who make up the Wakefield Grannies have just one aim - the idea that brought them together and forged an extended family spanning two continents. As with all good tales, the story of the Wakefield Grannies is an amazing tale of coincedence.

Brenda Rooney

Three years ago, Brenda Rooney and her husband, Robert, who run Rooney Productions from their home near Lac-des-Loups, Canada, screened a documentary ‘Condoms, Fish and Circus Tricks’, at Wakefield's United Church. The event raised $1,000 for the church's AIDS campaign, and set events in motion. In the audience was Thomas Minde, a doctor at Wakefield's hospital. His parents had just returned from a year in South Africa, where his mother, Nina, and Rose Letwaba, the head nurse at a children's psychiatric clinic in Alexandra Township, formed a support group for grandmothers caring for AIDS orphans.

Rose Letwaba

Thomas Minde urged the United Church minister, Gisele Gilfillen, to contact his mother. A few weeks later, Nina Minde spoke at a morning service. She showed pictures of the clinic and told the congregation about Rose Letwaba. Rose was planning a trip to Canada. Minde promised to bring her to Wakefield. One Saturday night in Autumn 2004, Rose Letwaba spoke at the Wakefield United Church. "There weren't very many people there," Norma remembers. "But Rose spoke very movingly."

An impromptu collection yielded about $900 - a lot for such a small group. But to Norma, it just wasn't enough. The next day, she spotted Rose and Nina at a reception in town. She told Rose how moved people had been by her talk. "I said, 'what if a group of women in Wakefield were to partner with these women?' And they both agreed this would be a marvellous idea."

In Toronto, the Stephen Lewis Foundation had unveiled an inspired initiative. Called the Grandmothers to Grandmothers campaign, it aimed to mobilise support for Africa's unrecognised heroes - impoverished matriarchs with the daunting task of raising growing numbers of the 13 million children orphaned by AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. What he didn’t know until just before the foundation's press conference was that, a yoga-practising octogenarian had come up with the same idea nearly 18 months earlier.

Norma Geggie

After hearing Rose speak about the grandmothers' plight, Norma Geggie recruited 10 women to the cause. And before you could say gogo (the Zulu word for grandmother), the Wakefield Grannies were born.

They've since paired up with 10 members of the Gogo Granny Outreach Project in the Johannesburg slum suburb of Alexandra Township, a group of 40 impoverished women who are raising nearly 160 children orphaned by AIDS. The Wakefield Grannies have raised close to $10,000, written letters and exchanged pictures and songs with their African partners.

They're a diverse group - there's a social worker, a sculptor, two or three teachers and a filmmaker who, with her husband, is shooting a documentary about the group. Two are French-Canadian, two are English-Canadian. Others were born in India, France, Poland, Germany, Australia, Scotland and England. Some aren't even grandmothers! But that's just a technicality. It's their spirit which sets them apart - well, that and their devotion to a band of African women thrust back intochild-rearing by the scourge of HIV/AIDS.

"Grandmothers of Africa are really in agony," Rose told journalists in Toronto last March. "Whether we like it or not, we have to support them."

"I think it's going to change society," Brenda says. "Women could run the world," she asserts in a tone that brooks no contradiction. "You realise that?"