ABSTRACT
“Just a little girl from Welkom” was how my partner, Pat, described me over and over again when we got back home to South Africa, as he proudly recounted watching me deliver the first ever plenary paper on children to more than 20,000 delegates at the XVI International AIDS Conference in Mexico City in 2008 (Richter, 2008). While I was growing up, Welkom was a small frontier mining town whose hastily established primary schools added a grade each year to accommodate children as we progressed from the prior class, sometimes in the same room with children from one or more lower grades. My father was the shaft-sinker for one of the new gold mines and we lived in a settler community—much like Kimberley and Johannesburg were when they started at the beginning of the 20th century, but on a very much smaller scale—erected to extract from the ground some of the enormous mineral wealth found in this part of the world.
