Pretoria - She never sold children to anyone. The family who claimed they paid for two orphans from her children’s home gave her a donation in appreciation of her good work.
This was the explanation of Raisibe “Mama Jackie” Ramohlola, 60, who told Judge Mohamed Ismail her heart went out to the poor, parentless children.
Social workers, the police and the councillors in her community were all happy about the work she did, she said, and they all brought homeless children to her Delfire Home and Care Centre in Diepsloot.
Mama Jackie took the stand for the second day in the high court in Pretoria to defend charges of child trafficking and running an illegal orphanage. The State claims she sold a month-old baby girl and a boy, 6, to a KwaMhlanga couple in 2012.
The couple said they paid Mama Jackie R15 000 for each child. They believed this was for their adoption.
However, they discovered that it was not an adoption if they did not receive birth certificates or other documentation for the children.
Mama Jackie said after reading about her good work in a newspaper, the couple came to visit her and the children, and then paid a “donation” into her bank account.
The couple again arrived at her home a few days after their “donation” and said they wanted a “thank you letter” to show that they had made the “donation”. Mama Jackie, who claims she cannot read or write, said they went to an internet café to write the letter. She was about to ask someone there to assist her, but the woman who later claimed she adopted the children, insisted on writing the letter herself.
“She wrote something and asked me to just sign the thank you letter.”
Mama Jackie said the woman then mentioned something about wanting to adopt some of her children, but she told her she could not facilitate an adoption.
“She then told me she wanted to take some of the children on holiday. I told her before I could do that I had to have her and her husband’s IDs in case something went wrong.”
Mama Jackie said the woman chose two children at the children’s home and the couple took them. One was a baby brought to her shelter by the child’s father and police. They could not locate the mother.
The other was a boy left outside the gates of the orphanage six years before, when he was a baby. Mama Jackie said that after the couple did not bring back the children after a few days, she became worried and phoned them. The woman said the children were not well and she was going to take them to a doctor.
When she did not hear from the couple again, she went to the police to open a case.
Mama Jackie was shown documents purporting to be “adoption papers” signed by her. The contents confirmed that the couple adopted the children. Although this was signed by Mama Jackie, she was adamant that she had no idea what the contents were, as she thought it was a “thank you letter”.
Asked why she still had children at her shelter after a court ordered her - following the alleged selling of the children - to shut down, Mama Jackie said she was looking after children of family members. One of the children Social Services discovered there was the child of a sick neighbour who left her there while she went to see a doctor, Mama Jackie said. She strongly denied she had defied the court order.
Pretoria News
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