Tshemba is a story that begins with two Witsies who left South Africa under apartheid and had successful careers overseas but still felt there was something missing from their lives.
A few years ago, they found a way to fill the gap they’d identified.
“As Neil and I came to the end of our working lives in Canada and the USA,” says Phillips, “we talked about what we could do to give back to the country that we still love and which was taken from us in the apartheid regime. In a way it was completing the golden circle of our lives. Finding time was never an issue, we just needed to discover what we could do to make a difference that was different.”
Rural health care was crying out for that difference. “The inequality between the urban and rural areas is so extreme that it was just not possible to turn a blind eye to it,” explains Tabatznik.
