The power behind the “Orphan Tower”

The 2012 Folklife Festival featured Creativity and Crisis: Unfolding the AIDS Memorial Quilt to mark the 25th anniversary of the AIDS Memorial Quilt and thirty years of life with AIDS. With the quilt as the anchor, this program commemorated the innovative and resourceful ways communities work to educate people and help them cope with one of the most complex pandemics in modern history.

This was made all the more poignant in the Common Threads tent, which was co-curated by the NAMES Project Foundation and the UCLA Art & Global Health Center. At the center was the “Orphan Tower,” made by the Siyazama (Zulu for “we are trying”) Project in South Africa, an organization developed in 1998 to work with women from the KwaZulu-Natal region. Its goals were to teach women market skills, inform them about HIV/AIDS transmission and prevention, and create a means to share information through traditional artistic skills and knowledge.

Beauty Ndlovu and Lobolile Ximba came to the Festival to demonstrate doll making and beadwork. Visitors to the tent quickly learned that each of the 634 dolls on the tower represents a child who was orphaned because of AIDS in Dannhauser, KwaZulu-Natal. With a population of only 5,389 (2011), 634 dolls represent nearly one out of eight children—a staggering number made even more alarming through the use of a child-friendly object.

The Orphan Tower came into our possession after a derecho swept through the Festival grounds on June 29, 2012. The severe storm, with wind gusts measuring sixty to eighty miles per hour, destroyed tents, crushed tables, and sent the “Orphan Tower” with all its dolls into the mud. Even after borrowing office space in the Smithsonian Castle to lay out, clean, and dry the dolls with a fan, they could not be restored to their original likeness. The Center negotiated to acquire the dolls and the structure and reimbursed the UCLA Art & Global Health Center so that the women of Dannhauser could make another powerful teaching tool for their community.