‘Broken Heart and family’ by Sheryl Garratt in NZ Herald, January 12, 2008. 

Mary Crockett doesn't know where she was born, or which of South Africa's tribal groups she belongs to. She was found abandoned in a coloured area of Johannesburg as a baby, and was raised in the city's orphanages.

One day in class, the teacher caught Leonard, one of the other orphans, writing a love letter. "Mary, I love you more than a chicken in the oven," it said. "Meet me at the gate."

After graduating from teacher training college together, the couple were married and had a baby boy two years later. They settled in the El Dorado Park area of Johannesburg, teaching in primary school and active in the church, where both were lay preachers.

Thirteen years were to go by before a second child, Cynthia, was born.

In retrospect, Mary can see that her daughter was never really well. Her husband fell ill with what he said was diabetes. Her own health hadn't been so good, either, but she put that down to being pregnant after such a long time: she was 38 when her daughter was born.

Then one Saturday morning when the baby was nine months old, they set out to the shopping centre as usual, but their car smashed head-on into a truck. Leonard and Cynthia died instantly. Mary survived, although she was in a coma for three months. When she came to, she learned that her husband and daughter had been buried by the community. The doctors also informed her that she was HIV positive.

It was only after she'd recovered, and found the suicide note in their safe at home, that she realised the collision was deliberate. After her husband had discovered he was HIV positive, he secretly took their daughter to be tested. When she proved to be positive too, he decided that the best course of action was to kill them all. "So it wasn't really an accident, he knew what he was doing," she says quietly.

"I was so desperate, because I was a pure girl, I never slept with anyone else. I lost my mind for a while - I went into a mental institution."

It took a year, but counselling - and her faith, to which she credits all of her strength now - got her through the breakdown. But although her health got steadily worse, she didn't tell anyone about her HIV status for a further year. "I was in denial. And I didn't know who to tell. I had no family, nor did my husband. It was terrible. I was very thin. I was giving up."

Finally, she got so sick she was admitted to hospital, and when word spread, her house was looted and burned down. The pastors' forum she belonged to asked her to leave. "They said they couldn't have a pastor with Aids in their churches," she says. "It hurt me for a while, but I'm used to it."

It was when she went to QwaQwa to teach that she finally began to break her silence. She confessed her HIV status to colleagues, and when some of them admitted they too were positive, she formed her first support group. Suddenly, she had found a reason for living, a new vocation. "And it is so satisfying," she smiles.