Sanna Winston remembers the first time alcohol passed her lips.
“It tasted terrible. It burned. It hurt,” she recalls.
Winston was “five or six” years old.
“My stepmother forced me to drink wine, so that I would be too scared to tell my father what she was doing behind his back. She used to say, ‘If you tell your father, I will tell him that you drank as well, and then we will both get a hiding from him.’ So I kept quiet.”
Today, the 38-year-old mother of five is enduring the consequences of her childhood trauma.
“I am a drinker. If someone makes me angry, or I get sad, then I drink a hell of a lot. Then I drink until the people see that I am totally drunk,” Winston acknowledges.
She lives in a small house, its windows broken and its walls peeling plaster, on a farm at Wellington in South Africa’s Western Cape province. The town’s in the heart of the country’s famed wine lands. The area is a kaleidoscope of beauty, with craggy gunmetal and russet mountains rising out of verdant vineyards and multicolored fruit plantations.
“The tourists who come here only see the pretty things. They don’t see us. We are kept hidden. We are disgraceful,” Winston mumbles, leading her 8-year-old daughter, Francisca, through a field of purple grapes.
As the girl gambols off down a gravel road to join her friends, Winston sighs, “Francisca is not like my other children. She’s not good at school.”
The mother pauses.
“With Francisca, when I got pregnant with her, I was drinking a lot, so bad that I lay on the ground drunk. I can see now that Francisca’s head is damaged,” she whispers. “Doctors have told me my girl has fetal alcohol syndrome.”
Experts say the disease, also known as FAS, is the most common preventable cause of mental retardation in the world. When mothers drink alcohol while they’re pregnant, their babies often suffer enduring physical and mental harm – including heart defects, stunting, diminished intelligence and behavioral problems. South Africa has the highest rate of FAS in the world. In some areas of the country, it affects up to 120 children out of every thousand.
Winston says her daughter has “bad memory” and “thinks very slowly.” She blames herself for the child’s condition. Winston says, “Francisca makes me think very badly about myself, about why I did such a terrible thing to her, drinking while she was inside me. My other children are not damaged like her. She’s my last baby; I can’t have any more children. Then I think, ‘Oh, God, why?’”
According to Professor Dennis Viljoen, an international authority on fetal alcohol syndrome, Francisca shows some of the “classic” symptoms of the affliction he brands a “field of human disaster” and the “most common birth defect in South Africa by far.”
“The current wisdom is that probably any alcohol affects a baby adversely. Any amount,” stresses Viljoen, who’s a pediatrician, a medical geneticist and head of the Foundation for Alcohol Related Research (FARR) in Cape Town.
Alcohol, he says, is “extremely poisonous” to an unborn baby. “What it does is it disrupts tissue formation, particularly in the brain, to such an extent that children suffer serious neurological consequences. They may also suffer organ defects, such as problems with their hearts and kidneys.”
Viljoen says some children with FAS suffer physical deformities, while others appear “on the surface” to be “perfectly normal.”
He explains that many FAS children, while looking “just like any other child,” perform badly at school. They’re hyperactive and can’t concentrate, and are less intelligent than other youngsters. He says, “Simply put, their brains are smaller” as a result of damage from the alcohol that their mothers drank while pregnant with them.
Viljoen adds that some children are “easily recognizable” as suffering from FAS, having small heads and eyes set wide apart, and being much shorter than other children of their age, as the alcohol has stunted their growth. He says in these cases FAS is a “growth deficiency in all aspects of the body; these children are much smaller in all aspects.”
Winston says when her daughter was born the child was indeed “very small. She looked shriveled up. I got a big fright,” she remembers. Then, tears fill the mother’s tired brown eyes.
“At the hospital, my friend told me, ‘That’s a monster, that’s not a child.’ I almost killed the baby when my friend said that. Then I told myself, ‘No. I Believe in God. This is a human being, this child... .’”
Besides having physical problems, says South African public health researcher, Kirstie Rendall-Mkosi, children suffering from FAS often drop out of school and join criminal gangs.