BIANCA WARBURTON
Bianca Warburton was completing her Masters in Educational Psychology at Wits University. She was nearing the end of her internship at Ububele. She had just written her Board exam.
She was shot and killed outside Alex Clinic on Wednesday 14th October. It may have been a hi-jack attempt. The gunmen ran away and nothing was taken. Bianca died instantly. She was found by another intern traveling behind her.
She was killed in the course of her work as she had been driving from Gordon Primary School, past Alex Clinic to do a radio slot on Alex FM that morning. She would then have returned to Ububele to participate in an Access Course group to think about mother-child work. A part of the Ububele work that had been most meaningful to her was participating in the Umdlezane Baby Mat work.
Bianca was a very special person and the staff at Ububele grew to love and respect her in response to the enormous love and care she showed those around her. She was generous, thoughtful, willing to help the organization and clearly very loved by her patients. When we had to phone the mothers of the children she saw in therapy to tell them about her death, the response was one of overwhelming grief-
‘what will we tell our children? She was their angel’
Ububele is deeply shocked by this senseless death and this horrible waste of a beautiful life. We are in deep mourning together with her family who are utterly bereft.
This devastating loss affects her family and friends, Ububele, the Alex community whom we serve, and our country. None of us is or should be left untouched by this.
Standing in London Road waiting for the very helpful and sensitive police who were there to do their forensic work, we were struck and moved by the sadness, fear and shame conveyed by the ordinary citizens of Alex around us. This was not a racial incident, but a criminal one, attesting to the need for the beloved country to weep as one country.
We ask you to think together with us as a psychoanalytic community of psychotherapists about how to turn this terrible violence to good.
Our hope at this point is so hard to hold onto. And yet we hope.
We hold onto hope that our beloved country can heal from its damage and that we cease to repeat the past in the present.
Gael Beckett
Ububele: African Psychotherapy Resource and Training Centre
16 10 09
Tags: Bianca Warburton, child care, education, hi-jacking, psychology, Ububele, violence
