Mother of Hillbrow’s destitute is in a league of her own
HILLBROW – It takes a strong woman to take destitute people in Hillbrown and give them a new lease on life through her love and kindness - and a strong woman is just what Melville resident Dorothy Gould is.
Dorothy Gould, founder of Johannesburg Awakening Minds (Jam) said she was trained for her life’s mission from when she was a little girl, who felt she had no voice.
Jam has transformed the lives of many of Hillbrow’s displaced people through teaching them to act. Gould said her parents had lived through both world wars and because of this, the home she grew up in had been a sad place, as her parents had been affected by the trauma of their past.
“My mother learned creative ways to express the emotions of the family,” said Gould. “She would recite poetry and teach this to me, and I remember how tears would come to her eyes when she did so.”
She said her mother always came out transformed through this sharing and she observed this with fascination. This same fascination drew Gould into the world of acting, where she learned to express her inner truth through the characters. “I finally had a voice.”
When she started acting on stage, she was so talented and convincing, she won many awards but still longed for more. She went to London when she was 36 and within four-and-a-half months had her own dressing room with a star on the door at West End. She remembers Princess Di coming to see a production at the theatre, then, with two little boys.
When she returned to South Africa, she returned as a more experienced actress. A turning point in her life came when she started to teach her profession in informal settlements and jails. One day, a prisoner reciting Shakespeare, who got tears in his eyes reading the words, made her realise that society’s broken could benefit as she had as a girl.
This, by learning to express their hearts through characters. She said the hurting, vulnerable girl that she was, had had her dignity and hope restored through acting, and she wanted to extend this same gift to others.
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