Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [199]
“My sadness wasn’t so much about not having toys as it was about facing my classmates,” recalled Oprah. “What would I say when the other kids asked what I’d gotten? That Christmas, three nuns showed up at our house with a doll, fruit, and games for us. I felt such a relief that I’d been given something, that I wasn’t forgotten. That somebody had thought enough of me to bring me a gift.”
Oprah spoke with orphanage caretakers in South Africa about gifts that would be culturally appropriate. “I was told none of these children had ever seen a black doll—most were dragging around blond, naked Barbies. Wouldn’t it be a wonder if each girl could see herself in the eyes of a doll that looked like her? It became my passion and mission to give a black doll to every girl I met.”
She spent the summer of 2002 choosing presents for the children. “I got a thrill out of seeing 127 sample dolls filling my office. After I’d picked the one I would have wanted when I was a girl, I called up the manufacturer and asked that its barely brown dolls be double-dipped to darken them. We chose soccer balls for the boys, solar-powered radios for the teens and jeans and T-shirts for everyone. And I wanted every child to receive a pair of sneakers. In South Africa, where many of the children walk around barefoot in the blistering sun, shoes are gold.”
Oprah financed the flights for herself, Stedman, Gayle, and thirty-seven employees, with all their technical equipment to film the events for future shows, plus three hundred thousand Christmas presents that her staff had spent months wrapping. Her first stop was Johannesburg, where she distributed presents to children in schools and orphanages. She traveled to Qunu, the rural village of Nelson Mandela, where he played the role of Father Christmas and helped her give gifts to sixty-five hundred children who had walked miles to meet the man they called Madiba, Mandela’s tribal name. At each stop Oprah’s staff set up party tents filled with bubbles, carnival music, jesters, and more food than these children had ever seen.
Oprah said her Christmas Kindness, which she filmed for her show, had transformed her life. “It cost me $7 million but it was the best Christmas I ever had.” During those three weeks she was overwhelmed by the number of orphans she saw who had become parentless because of AIDS, and before she left South Africa she had adopted ten children, ages seven to fourteen, who had no one to care for them. “I knew I couldn’t save all the children, but I could manage to stay personally engaged with these ten,” she said. “I enrolled them in a private boarding school and hired caretakers to look after them.”
Oprah justified her long-distance parenting because of her career. “I didn’t bring these kids over here [because] my lifestyle is not such that I could devote all my time to them and that is what would need to happen.” A continent away, she could hardly be a mother, but she became a generous benefactor. “Every Christmas I returned with gobs of presents,” she said. In 2006 she bought her ten “children” a big house and hired a decorator to personalize each of their bedrooms. But when she returned the following year she was dismayed to find them riveted to their $500 RAZR cell phones and talking about their portable PlayStations, iPods, sneakers, and hair extensions. “I knew immediately that I’d given them too much,” she said, “without instilling values to accompany the gifts.” The following year she did not give them “gobs of presents.” Instead she made them choose a family as impoverished as they had once been and spend their holiday doing something kind for others.