Angy Rabothatha’s phone is never off. The Tshwane nurse makes around 50 calls a day to patients infected with Covid-19. She is available to them after hours, too.

Even on Rabothatha’s birthday – she turned 43 on 20 May – she fielded calls while celebrating under lockdown with her husband Phillimon, a labour agent, and children Mpho, 18, and Mohau, 7. It was a festive day at their home in Soshanguve, with surprise gifts and a dinner of lamb, spinach and savoury rice, malva pudding and cheesecake.

Rabothatha joined the Gauteng Department of Health in 2007. Three years later she was promoted to district programme coordinator for the child health, communicable disease and outbreak response unit. Now she is back at work in her central Pretoria office, making calls from eight to five and sometimes even later. 

Rabothatha is part of a Tshwane tracing team of 30 people which includes nurses, researchers and other volunteers. There are similar teams across the country.

“I get calls when I’m at home, too,” she says. “I always answer. You never know, maybe somebody needs your help. I never put my phone off. Luckily my husband is very supportive. He’ll be like, ‘Ja neh, better take that call, my love.’ When you have a family who supports you, pursuing your passion is easy.”

Over our WhatsApp call, Rabothatha’s voice is warm and laced with laughter as she talks about her background. Born in Rustenburg, she was mostly raised by her granny. When her grandmother passed away, she lived with her mother, and when her mother passed away, she lived with her uncle and aunt. “None of them had money,” says Rabothatha. “But what they had was love.”

It was her aunt who inspired her career. “My aunt was a professional nurse. She inspired me. I loved nursing from an early age. You know, in matric when you write that essay about what you want to become one day? I wrote about wanting to become a nurse. I wrote about the difference I wanted to make, the hope I wanted to bring into people’s lives, the smiles I wanted to see on their faces. It was in Tswana. I got a B for that subject.”

A heartbreaking blow

In October last year, fate dealt Rabothatha’s family a heartbreaking blow. Her and Phillimon’s middle child, Tshego, 13, succumbed to complications following bone marrow surgery at the Netcare Unitas hospital in Centurion.

“My youngest son, Tshego’s brother, Mohau, donated the bone marrow,” says Rabothatha. “But a few days after the transplant, there were complications. My son passed away on 6 October. My heart was broken. I looked up to God for strength.

“Tshego got sick with leukaemia when he was six years old. Throughout his illness, my son would say: ‘Don’t worry mummy, God is in charge. Don’t worry mummy, this too shall pass.’ He was a strong boy, and he got better, but then went into remission last year in June,” she says.

Tshego is buried at the Sandfontein cemetery, which Rabothatha passes twice a day, on her way to work and back.

“I won’t lie, it is painful every day,” she says. “It wasn’t easy. God is the only one who can mend a broken heart; God carried us, my husband and I. Believing in God really helped me get more compassion for people. That love you get, you also give it to others.”

A professional challenge

Now, Rabothatha is pouring her love into patients who test positive for Covid-19 – a professional challenge like none before.

“Outbreaks, we’ve had in the past. There has been food poisoning here and there, measles here and there, but this Covid-19, it is the biggest of them all,” she says. “So I deal with Covid-19 positive cases. We get the list from the National Institute for Communicable Diseases. Every day they send the Gauteng list, from which we take the Tshwane cases. It’s a long, long, list of names. Then we call everyone – we are a team of about 30 making the calls.

“I call up to 50 people a day. If you test positive, we want to know when did you do the test. Are you in Pretoria, are you at home, where are your close contacts – your family? We want to know your comorbidities, can you isolate where you are? I mean, some of these patients live [with] 19 people in a house. So we arrange for them to go to an isolation site. We have transport that picks them up at home, takes them to the sites, and then back home again afterwards. After 14 days we call them again to check on how they are. If they’re well after 14 days, we close the file.”

Health authorities differentiate between quarantine and isolation. Quarantine is the separation and restricted movement of people exposed to Covid-19, to see if they become sick; while isolation is for patients who have tested positive for the virus.

“Many people who test positive for Covid-19 are shocked, some of them are frustrated,” says Rabothatha. “We reassure them, educate them, tell them what should happen. I’m on the phone all day. When we started, I knew all the patients, I could remember all their names. Now there are too many. Still, those you have long conversations with, those struggling to accept the infection, the ones you have to educate; those names stay in your mind for some time.” 

Born to be a nurse

Spotlight first learned of Rabothatha’s extraordinary work while interviewing patient Bets King on her quarantine experience at a Johannesburg facility. King, originally from Upington, lives in London with her husband. She returned to South Africa to arrange visa documents on 28 May and was placed under quarantine at the Birchwood Hotel in Boksburg.

She describes the experience as an “ordeal”, as the meals did not cater for her gluten intolerance. She also has an auto-immune illness – Hashimoto’s disease – which added to the stress of being tested positive for Covid-19.

“On the fourth day of quarantine, they gave us the option of having a private or government Covid test,” King tells Spotlight. “I first opted for the government test, then realised it was a nose swab. The private test (at Lancet Laboratories) was a throat swab, which I thought would hurt less, but it cost R850. I could not afford it, but fortunately my husband sent me some money, and I had it done.

“The next day, on day five, everyone’s test results came back, except mine. Eventually at 23:00, I got an SMS that I’m positive. I phoned my husband and cried my eyes out. The trauma, tears and heartache, I cannot describe. It made no sense, as everyone who had been seated around me on the Qatar flight from London, tested negative.”

Amid this trauma, King received a call from Rabothatha. “Then this nurse Angy from Pretoria called me,” recalls King. “She was such a nice person, the nicest person I had spoken to since I had left London. She was assigned to me by the government. She said to me: ‘Love, are you coughing?’ I said to her: ‘Of course I’m coughing, I am a smoker.’ She said to me: ‘Love, any time day or night, if you need me, phone me.’ Nurse Angy was an absolute star, the nicest person… she was born to be a nurse.”

Later, two more Covid-19 tests lifted King’s fears as the results came back negative. King maintains that during this ordeal, Rabothatha’s kindness was a lone beacon of light.

Nursing is a calling 

Speaking to Spotlight, Rabothatha says she remembers King. “Elizabeth (Bets) was so special to me. She was crying so much. She said I was the first person who would actually listen to her. She said she felt so alone. She was so grateful.”

Where does Rabothatha find the kindness that underpins her work?

“For nursing, it really is a calling,” she says. “It’s not a money-seeking career. You also have those rude people neh, those people who say: ‘Don’t call me again! We don’t need your support.’ But then we call again. It’s sad for us, as we want to be there for everyone. On the other hand, there are those patients who are so appreciative and humble. Human beings will always be human beings, you know.”

Rabothatha qualified at the Excelsius Nursing College in Klerksdorp in 2000, where her favourite subject was community health. She was not brought up in a Christian family and only discovered God in her tertiary years. 

“I realised I wanted to walk this walk with God,” she says.

This too shall pass

Her advice on the coronavirus pandemic?

“The deaths we have had, sadly it’s mostly those patients with comorbidities,” says Rabothatha. “But there have been much, much more recoveries than deaths, though, which is nice. I want people to know, there’s always hope. Testing positive is not the end of the world. Don’t panic. There are people at the health department who are there to support you. There are people walking with you on this path. Just stay calm. This too shall pass.” DM/MC

This article was produced by Spotlight – health journalism in the public interest. Sign up for our newsletter.