From Mount Frere we drove 2 hours north to Matatiele, our home-base for filming at the Mamohau project in Masupha. We’ve been there twice before and are absolutely in love with the area and the people. We got some great footage of the Mamohau ladies preparing nutrition for the orphans.

They are such caring ladies and take such good care of the kids, lovingly washing their hands before mealtime and coating their cracked winter skin with vaseline. Elio continued filming during lunch, and we got some great shots of Priscilla helping to feed a sick boy.

The next day we filmed at a nearby project called Itekeng Batswari. We stayed for a greeting, a meeting, a feeding … and handing out blankets was on the agenda, but the blanket company delivered them to Cape Town by accident, which was a real bummer.

The mamas of Itekeng

The kids of Itekeng

We finished with one more day of filming in Masupha. We got a lot of footage of the cemetary tucked away behind the village. Each family has a section where they have buried their dead. It’s a beautiful, chilling spot, and clearly there were a lot of fresh plots. However, the people in Masupha seem very reluctant to list HIV/AIDS as a cause of death. Not only that, but you can’t even get them to say it. “”These diseases” was as near as the project manager would come to acknowledging the existence of AIDS.

Girl at the graveyard, near her father's grave

As usual we were treated with such love at Masupha! And as we left, we were each given a jar of peaches from the Mamohau secratary’s very own trees! We had some the other night, and they were delish.

Farewell song at Mamohau