I first met Mary in Toronto, in a workshop on grief. I had come from Ottawa and she from Kenya to attend the Grandmothers' Gathering, an event organized by the Stephen Lewis Foundation (SLF) prior to last summer's XVI International AIDS Conference. I soon found out that the lovely, graceful woman I was talking to had much to grieve about. In the past two years she had nursed and buried her husband, son, daughter-in-law and son-in-law, all of whom had died of AIDS. Now she was supporting her widowed daughter and her daughter's nine-month-old baby and raising four orphaned grandchildren -- all in her tiny home in a small village about 15 kilometres from Nairobi.

When I saw her, Mary was wearing a brightly coloured African dress and a necklace and earrings she'd made herself; her brown hair was in braids wrapped around her head (styled, she told me proudly, by her daughter, an aspiring hairdresser). She was slim and beautiful -- though I soon discovered that in Africa, unlike in Canada, slimness is often a sign of illness.

Pain of losing her children
Until I met Mary, I thought I understood the plight of African women and children. As a health promotion consultant who has worked with the World Health Organization for several years, I knew that there are about 13 million AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa, and that at least 50 per cent of them are being raised by their grandmothers. Though I'd read the reports and the terrible statistics, words on paper are nothing like having a loving mother and grandmother sit beside you and describe the pain of losing her children. “It's not,” said Mary, in quiet understatement, “the natural order of things.”

Though Mary and I live worlds apart, I understood her immediately and, without warning, began to cry. Imagining what it would be like to bury my own adult children, then to pick up and parent my grandchildren, was almost unthinkable. We hugged each other and cried some more. But Mary, like so many of the grandmothers in her village and in hundreds of similar villages, has little time for tears. Overpowering her sadness is her anxiety about having enough money to feed, care for and educate her grandchildren.

Pride and fear
Raising children is expensive in any country, still the disparities between my life and Mary's are huge. I live in Ottawa in a spacious three-bedroom house with my husband and our dog. My four children and 10 grandchildren live in their own homes; I'm fortunate that I can help out by paying for “extras” such as music lessons and summer camp. Mary doesn't know about extras. After the death of her husband and son, she became the sole breadwinner, but she had already spent what little money the family had on medicines and funerals. Since then she has been desperately looking for ways to pay compulsory school fees and purchase uniforms so that her grandchildren can attend school.

Despite the chasms between us we bonded once again as, in typical proud-grandparent fashion, we enthused about the importance of educating the next generation and the pride we feel when our (exceedingly smart) grandchildren do well in school. I thought about the opportunities my grandchildren have, about our wonderful public school system -- and how we take so much for granted.

That Mary has to pay for school uniforms seems so unfair, though, as she explained, a uniform at least ensures that a child has something decent to wear.

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