In giving, she found strength

Having lost her parents in a plane crash at age 16, Beth Rettig knew the pain of becoming an orphan.

That may be why she was so profoundly touched by the plight of an estimated 2 million South African children orphaned by AIDS when she visited there in August 2007.

That may be why, when Rettig was diagnosed with ovarian cancer six months later, she continued to push for the creation of the Mukhanyo Christian Academy, a school to train new leaders and reclaim a lost generation.

Her friends say the project has kept her going long after her doctors had given up hope.

Rettig, a Chapel Hill real estate agent with a background in education, had traveled to South Africa with a group from the Church of the Good Shepherd in Durham. They visited the Mukhanyo Theological College in the Kwa Ndebele region, a black homeland not far from Pretoria. Seminary-run day-care centers provide meals twice a day to more than 1,500 children who have lost both parents to AIDS.

Rettig and the others were heartbroken by tales of children being raised by teenage siblings, living in one-room metal huts, without heat or running water. Flip Buys, the founder of the seminary, said one 15-year-old boy routinely fed his three younger brothers by shooting birds with his sling shot and cooking his prey over a dung fire.

One night at dusk, Rettig and her friend Haleh Moddasser of Durham were looking out over the African plains, pondering how they might help.

"Beth turned to me and said, 'Come back here with me and start a school,'" Moddasser recalled.

You see, while the children in the KwaNdebele region do attend public school, there are often 70, 80, even 100 children packed into a single classroom, with one teacher. The schools, like their homes, are in metal shacks without heat or running water. There are no books.

Barely 8 percent of public schoolchildren in the region graduate, according to Buys. Only 8 percent of the graduates qualify for university; and 96 percent of those who do get to university flunk out in their first year.

In many ways, it is the legacy of apartheid.

Offering them a future

But Rettig, gentle, kind and self-deprecating, was determined that course could be changed.

"The seminary helps to get these children to the baseline of subsistence," Moddasser said. "The school will actually give these children a future."

More than that, Buys believes, it gives South Africa a future.

"One child can be the change agent that can turn the tide of a nation," he said.

When the Good Shepherd crew returned to the Triangle, they quickly began organizing. They knew that launching a school would require hard work, prayer and a lot of money. Rettig was the driving force.

In early February 2008, she and her husband, Ed, put together a "visionary conference" for the academy. A week later, discomfort in her abdomen was diagnosed as ovarian cancer.

Battling cancer

Over the next 10 months, Rettig went through six rounds of chemotherapy. In December 2008, the doctors said there wasn't much more they could do. She and her husband traveled to Canada and Germany seeking alternative therapies -- again, without lasting success.

"Just a few weeks before her death, she and Ed were on their last trip to Canada, and she called and asked me to talk to her about Mukhanyo," said Jennifer Stenner, a fellow real estate agent and friend. "She was in a lot of pain, and she said Mukhanyo was the only thing that kept her going."

Beth Rettig died Monday, days before Buys and the academy's newly hired head mistress arrived for the fundraisers. A memorial service for Rettig will be held at 11 a.m. today at the Church of the Good Shepherd.

But her dream lives on. In mid-January, the first class of kindergarten and first-graders will take their seats.

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