Oscar-winner Emma visits EC women and children

SISTERS: British actress and academy award winner Emma Thompson talks to Tandeka Mbula of Glenmore, outside Grahamstown, about the issues of HIV/Aids and violence against women. Picture: PHILLIP NOTHNAGEL

By NICOLETTE SCROOBY

Leisure Reporter

DOUBLE Academy Award-winner Emma Thompson, 48, has a way of taking the focus off herself and putting it back onto those who are far more needy.

In South Africa – more particularly Grahamstown – to meet with women and children from poor communities, the down-to-earth actress-screenwriter-woman’s rights activist yesterday turned the conversation with her young fans around, engaging them gently with questions about their own lives.

“I’m here to gather information about what life is really like for people living here,” said the tall, slender actress who seemed utterly at ease with community members, with whom she talked about HIV/Aids and violence against women and children.

“This century is about engaging politically to see how we can work together to solve problems and use resources.

“I’ve enjoyed South Africa, just spending time with people and making their struggle mine,” she said.

The best thing about her visit so far had been the opportunities to interact with children, she said. But unlike other Hollywood celebrities who came to Africa to adopt a child, Thompson is not here to take one home.

She said she had initially considered adopting a child after learning that she was unable to have more children.

“But I thought I would make myself more useful to lots of children this way, instead of helping out one through adoption,” she said.

She joined the international poverty-fighting organisation Action Aid in 2000, after reading an article about grandparents bringing up children in South Africa.

This stirred up a burning desire to visit Africa. Her first trip was to Uganda. She has also visited Mozambique and Ethiopia.

She flew into South Africa last week with her seven-year-old daughter, Gaia Romilly – and was amazed at the infrastructure that she found.

“For one thing, you have (so many) roads, which is something I’m not used to in other African countries,” she said.

While in Johannesburg, Thompson, who won an Oscar for Best Actress in Howard’s End and another for Best Adapted Screenplay for Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, presented a two-day theatre workshop and also visited surrounding townships.

This week, she began touring some of the country’s poorest villages.

Dressed in a simple white cotton dress with an array of beaded Aids awareness symbols, Thompson arrived at the Masifunde education and development project trust in Grahamstown to discuss ways of bringing people together.