Gogo was sitting on the sofa, sipping tea. The man sitting across from her was drinking water. She didn’t see her mother anywhere, it was Saturday and she was supposed to be home like always. Her mother didn’t go out partying like all her friends’ mothers did. She loved cooking up a storm on Saturdays and Sundays while singing along to romantic songs on the radio.

“Sit down, Aphiwe, here, next to me,” her grandmother said, patting the empty space on the couch.

Aphiwe looked at the man sitting across from them. She didn’t know him but she assumed the car parked outside was his.

“Where is Mama?” she asked her grandmother.

“She’s in the bedroom.”

They didn’t get a lot of visitors but her mother was always excited when they did. She’d be walking up and down offering them drinks and food and trying too hard to be hospitable. Her being in the bedroom was confusing to Aphiwe.

“Aphiwe, this is your father. He has come to see you,” Gogo said.

The man had not said a word so far, all he had been doing was stare at her.

“My father? I thought he was dead.”

When she said that, the man looked away.

“Who told you that?”

“Nobody told me that, Gogo, no one told me anything. I thought he was dead because he has never come to see me.”

Aphiwe did not have any questions ready in her head. She had concluded that her father was dead when she was six years old because her friend in Grade 1 had told her that when people die they disappear and you never see them again.

She looked at him and tried to figure out if they looked alike or not. She couldn’t tell.

“I brought you a present,” the man said.

He pulled a box from under the coffee table. Aphiwe took it, reluctantly.

The silence meant she must open it. Inside was a doll, a skinny one with long legs and blonde hair. She was 10, and felt old to be playing with dolls.

Also in the box was a book about a girl and three bears. She read books with words and paragraphs now, not big drawings and one sentence on each page.

She wasn’t happy about that present either.

Under the book was a cell phone. Now that she liked. She smiled and looked up at him.
“Thank you,” she said.

Her mother had blatantly refused to buy her a cell phone, even though almost all her friends had one.

“I was thinking that maybe you can come visit me where I live, when schools are closed though. We could get to know each other.”

Gogo cleared her throat and looked at the man.

“Aphiwe, go put those things in your room,” Gogo said.

She jumped from the sofa and ran to her room, forgetting the doll on the coffee table.

Her grandmother called her out of the bedroom when the man was leaving. A hug from the man and another request for her to visit him, and that was it. That was the first and last time she saw her father.

Aphiwe found out that evening that her mother was angry, that she locked herself in the bedroom because she didn’t want to see him ever in her life. She and Gogo were arguing in her mother’s bedroom but she could hear them. And her mother was threatening to take that cell phone and smash it against the wall. She did remove it — Aphiwe never saw it again.

Now Aphiwe is 13, and in the past two years so much has happened. Her mother met a man at a funeral and he became her boyfriend. Aphiwe and Gogo saw less and less of her. And then the wedding. Her mother packed all of her clothes and left.

Now Aphiwe has to go and live with that man because she can’t live with her mother and her new husband.

She is not just leaving her home and her school, she is leaving the province, all the way to Mpumalanga where her father lives.

It’s very far and she knows Gogo won’t come to visit her because now she is always sick. She goes to the hospital all the time to get her kidneys cleaned.

Aphiwe will fly in an airplane, for the first time, tomorrow morning. The man…her father…will pick her up at the airport and they will drive to his house.

“What if I don’t recognise him, Gogo?”

“Don’t worry, he will recognise you.”

Aphiwe knows Gogo is worried too, she just doesn’t want to show it.

“You are going to go to a good school there, an expensive school where you can do anything, play any sports you want. You could even join a choir and be a singer. All you have to do is behave, try to act like all the children there, they will like you.”

Aphiwe has never been that type of child who acts like all the other children, and that makes her even more scared about her new life. She is the child who leads the pack in mango-stealing escapades. She is always running and she is loud.

When her grandmother is done packing her suitcase, she makes them pray before they go to sleep.

“Lord, please protect my grandchild as she goes to live with strangers,” she prays.

Tell us: Have you ever been forced to stay with strange family members? What happened? How did you manage?