Living with hope : a phenomenological inquiry of the experiences of teenagers heading an aids-orphaned home

M.Ed.The HIV and AIDS pandemic is changing the nature of the traditional family structure, particularly in South Africa, where the number of child-headed families is escalating and more teenagers are forced to head the home. These teenagers, are traumatised: many have suffered multiple losses (a father, mother, siblings), not to mention the possible additional losses of schooling, their hope for the future and their remaining childhoods. Hope is unlikely to emerge in teenagers left to fend for themselves and their siblings. Therefore, an approach that is both Afrocentric and ecosystemic needs to be adopted in building support structures to instil the possibility of hope in their lives. Hope, as a protective phenomenon, builds resiliency empowering teenagers heading a home to rise above their harsh circumstances. The purpose of this inquiry was to explore and describe the essence of hope in the lived experiences of teenagers heading an AIDS-orphaned home in order to make recommendations for support within the emerging inclusive educational system in South Africa. A qualitative study with a phenomenological research design was used with three teenagers from a Non-Governmental Organisation which assists child-headed households in Soweto, Gauteng. The participants were purposefully selected as hopeful — teenagers who had managed to stay in school, despite their circumstances, as a way of securing a brighter future. Data was collected through two in-depth interviews with the teenagers and included writing and drawing exercises. A story thickening the counterplot of hope in their lives, which are filled with the challenges of orphanhood, was written for each of the teenagers. The coconstructed stories were then used as data for analysis to write their descriptions of hope. Textual, structural and textual-structural descriptions of hope were written June 2008 based on the four processes of epoche, phenomenological reduction, imaginative variation and synthesis. The findings generated from their stories of hope indicate that the "hopeful self" is socially constructed evolving in the spaces between people and in the interaction iii of the person with his/her environment. Some of the findings suggest that hope emerges in the context of opportunities, support and education, and needs the African spirit of "ubuntu" to sustain it. School in particular, was seen as a way to future success. On the basis of these findings, a social constructionist model for nurturing the hopeful self was recommended to help professionals in their thinking and planning of psychological support programmes for all children and teenagers identified as vulnerable. The model embraces ecosystemic thinking and envisages the hopeful self as being nurtured in three nested domains of support: the emerging inclusive education system; a network of care under the facilitation of educational psychologists based in the District Based Support Teams; and a psychological support system that has not as yet been implemented in the care children orphaned by AIDS. Psychological support is seen as crucial to ensure the emotional well-being of teenagers at risk who who are faced with the reality of heading a home at such an early age as a result of the AIDS pandemi