The cry of an abandoned child
Lerato Maleke | Monday May 19, 2014 15:12
As for Bontle, (not her real name), this was only a pipe dream. She doesn’t have a mother and a father. Bontle is one of many who have been denied the privilege to celebrate the big day and buy her mother presents.
She doesn’t know her family members too as well as relatives. Yours truly met Bontle at a salon in Mochudi. A beautiful woman indeed in her 30s, she has never worked in her life. She says that she did not get proper education and that she was not raised well. Then she sobs and reveals that she was adopted while still a baby at Deborah Retief Memorial Hospital.
Currently she stays with a woman who adopted her and other children. She says that the woman adopted her because at the time she thought she was barren, “but then after five years she got a baby, then the second followed, then the third and fourth,” she explains.
However, Bontle is quick to explain that the woman never loved her, especially after realising that she was not barren and hence gave birth to her first child. Her adopted mother loved her before she got her own children.
Bontle reveals that the woman didn’t give her proper education like her other children and that she did not buy her clothes and provide good food. She says she lived a tough life and finally she took a decision to vacate the woman’s house because of the ill-treatment.
“The children of the woman who I took as my younger sisters and have raised them together with Mma Bontle (her adopted mother), also hate me,” she explains.
She says they called her all sorts of names and that this is why she left. “At times they even called me a hoe, the reason being I am beautiful and therefore they thought that I sleep around with different men, who hence support me,” she stated with tears running down her cheeks.
She says she had long suspected that the woman was not her real mother because she looked totally different from her sisters and the mother as well. Until one day, when another family member, an uncle, (mother’s younger brother) revealed all.
He told me that the reason why they all hated me in the family except him is that I was adopted by his sister.
Therefore Bontle demanded that she be shown her real parents but to no avail. “Since that day I left I have never gone back to that woman and her children,” she explains.
Currently Bontle is staying comfortably in a rented house with her boyfriend in Gaborone. She says the family doesn’t know where she is and that when she is in Mochudi, she never visits them.
“Therefore they claim that I am selling my body in Gaborone in order to survive,” she explains. She says her boyfriend took her to his parent’s house, whereupon he informed them that she doesn’t have parents and that he has plans to marry her.
She says the boyfriend’s family (name withheld) has agreed that lobola will be paid and that Bontle will open a bank account and take care of the money. “I cannot take lobola to a woman who has let me suffer. She should reveal to me who my parents are”.
But all in all “ba tshwanetse ba nnyadisa” she lamented, (They should see that I get married).