A Life Devoted to Those at the Margins

Johan Viljoen’s religious journey took him from the Dutch Reformed Church via the Anglican priesthood to the Catholic Church. And always his life is devoted to the poor, as GUSHWELL?BROOKS?explains.

He was born into the Dutch Reformed Church, went on to become an Anglican priest and wanted to pursue his religious life as a Catholic, either as a Jesuit or Franciscan priest.

The universe has steered Johan Viljoen on to a path which he has followed with no regrets, first with the Aids Office of the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference (SACBC) and now on a new challenge as the new South African country director Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS).

Full disclosure: I now work with Mr Viljoen at JRS, of which I am now communications officer.

In light of recent upsurges of xenophobic violence, increased turmoil and conflict across our continent, ever more repressive immigration laws and hardened government approaches towards foreign nationals, Mr Viljoen has a huge task ahead in running JRS’ South Africa office.

Mr Viljoen’s work history does not read like a CV but rather as an enchanting biography.

As an Anglican priest, somewhere around 1990/91, he decided to live with black people and work with the social issues that afflicted the most brutalised and marginalised people in South Africa.

“I did not become a priest to run a parish; I wanted to work with the poor and refugees,” he says.

Mr Viljoen was based in Winterveld, north of Pretoria, in the then-Bophuthatswana. At the time the Mozambican civil war led to half a million seeking refuge in South Africa. A spiritual awakening and subsequently his conversion to Catholicism occurred while he was working alongside the Sisters of Mercy.

“The Catholic principle of Christ’s presence in the Holy Sacrament always fascinated me,” he says.

One day, during Mass, he rose to receive the sacrament of Communion, despite not yet being confirmed in the Church. The priest, Fr Jean Pierre Le Scour, advised him that he would not refuse him the sacrament, but counselled that his reception of the Catholic Eucharist was a matter of conscience.

“As I received the Holy Sacrament, I felt a surge of power,” says Mr Viljoen.

Soon thereafter he resigned from the Anglican Church. He was received into the Catholic Church.

Not long after, he began working for the SACBC.

He was working in Ressano Garcia, a town on the South African/Mozambican border, at a reception centre for the internally displaced, providing food and medical assistance.

On October 4, 1992, the Rome General Peace Accords were negotiated, with the crucial mediation of the Catholic  Community of Sant’Egidio. It brought the 22-year-long Mozambican civil war between Renamo and Frelimo to an end.

The International Organisation for Migration started efforts to resettle internally displaced refugees in Mozambique.

“It was a huge repatriation initiative, which took years.” says Mr Viljoen.

About five years later, Fr Peter Balleis SJ, then JRS’s Southern African director  and now its international director, deployed Mr Viljoen to Angola since his work with Mozambican refugees gifted him with the ability to speak Portuguese fluently.

Mr Viljoen’s mission saw him based in a remote part of Angola, in the middle of the bush where he had to occupy a house owned by the Society of Jesus in Angola.

The house needed many repairs, and with the assistance of two Jesuit scholastics he managed to make a life in the tropical wilderness of Angola during 1997.

The prolonged civil war in Angola had also seen to many internally displaced and vulnerable people, people who hid in the wild to escape Unita’s bullets.

As the Angolan civil war lulled, South Africa faced a renewed refugee crisis as a result of the conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia.

The SACBC feared that they would not have sufficient resources to deal with this renewed refugee crises and so Mr Viljoen returned to set up the JRS offices in Pretoria and Johannesburg in 1998.

But another crisis—one that resonated with Viljoen on a personal basis—loomed. The South African HIV/Aids pandemic was spinning out of control, exacerbated by the Aids denialism of the Mbeki government.

“At some stage, I was being taken care of in a hospice, I weighed 47 kg, my CD4 count was 95—that is extremely low—and one of the nurses that was looking after me told me, ‘No man, you need to pull yourself together’,” Mr Viljoen recalls.

This is when anti-retroviral (ARV) treatment turned his life around, literally—two weeks later he reported back to work!

Mr Viljoen says that he had never sought high-profile jobs within the corporate or civil society spheres. What has been his driving force throughout all these years is his sense of vocation, hence his desire to serve as a Jesuit or Franciscan priest. As a result of his health, he could never pursue this calling.

“I find myself doing what I want to do. Things sometimes work out for the best. As a Franciscan or as a Jesuit, I would have had to take a vow of obedience. There is a possibility that I might have been sent somewhere else and I would not have been able to work with the poor,” he says.

As the world was preparing itself for the apocalypse that the Y2K bug was supposed to bring at the beginning of the year 2000, Mr Viljoen was fighting another bug, one that killed thousands needlessly.

He was appointed programme manager at SACBC’s Aids Desk (which was later elevated to Aids Office).

Pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers Squibb had endowed the SACBC and the Catholic Medical Mission Board with a five-year fund to combat the pandemic.

Mr Viljoen remembers the challenges Aids Desk faced: “At the time government had not rolled out an anti-retroviral scheme, our funding and work was largely based in homecare and hospices across 70 sites. We also funded projects aimed at assisting Aids orphans.”

A United States presidential fund changed everything.

The United States President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief—generally known by its acronym Pepfar—was the US government’s initiative to help save the lives of those suffering from HIV/Aids around the world.

The SACBC received a significant grant from Pepfar, enabling the Catholic Church to roll out an ARV programme. Where the Church’s work in the area of HIV/Aids had been confined to palliative care sites, it now initiated a world-first: a massive and ambitious project to roll out ARVs through existing palliative care units.

Nurses and caregivers were trained to take blood samples; a courier company had to be contracted to speedily convey these blood samples to the laboratory for testing; laptops and Internet connections needed to be provided to enable these caregivers and nurses to receive e-mails with results from the laboratory; and the courier company needed to deliver neatly packaged and sorted ARV prescriptions.

This SACBC?Aids Desk initiative, Mr Viljoen says, was the first such programme anywhere in the world.

The programme’s footprint reached far and wide. It was dependent on caregivers (who in some cases were functionally illiterate) within the innermost depths of rural Kwa-Zulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape.

With 22 sites across South Africa and 45000 people having directly benefited from ARV treatment, Mr Viljoen, Aids Desk head Sr Alison Munro OP, and their team achieved the impossible: to make massive inroads in curbing the impact of HIV/Aids at a time when a government allowed a treatable illness to be a rampant death sentence.

Now the Aids Office has passed on the baton to a more responsive government. Under health minister Dr Aaron Motsoaledi, South Africa is boasting the world’s largest state-sponsored ARV programme.

Only two sites remain in the SACBC project. One is at Nazareth House in Johannesburg, the other in Topologo in Rustenburg, North West Province.

HIV/Aids no longer is the pre-eminent crisis it was, Mr Viljoen says. “People need to get tested and if their CD4 count is below 350, they need to go on ARV treatment.”

Of course, it is necessary to continue addressing the HIV/Aids problem, but cross-border migration has become the new looming crisis in the world.

“Look at the xenophobic violence here in South Africa. Refugees and migration is a pressing issue globally. The situation is likely going to get worse for displaced people,” Mr Viljoen says.

Explaining why he has returned to the Jesuit Refugee Service, he says: “I want to continue to put my energy and expertise into addressing pressing social needs.”

If there was any doubt, he is the man for the job: working with the social needs of people is a vocational calling for him, and his track record is testimony to the fact that he has a Midas touch in addressing even the most challenging issues facing the continent today.

For more information about JRS, visit www.jrs.net