For those of you not aware of the story of the Suburban Tarzan, allow me to recap.
The eight-year old boy had been held captive by his father, who suffered from paranoia and made his home into a fortress. The boy had lived in these conditions for at least four years, with no outside contact except for television and old movies.
On November 12, the father - an Austrian - collapsed and called an ambulance.
Paramedics were forced to lift the front gate off its rails to get inside.
...
Five days passed before some men working at a computer store nearby heard the boy's calls. He was on his abdomen, offering two 5c coins through a gap in the wall - because he wanted someone to buy him some food.
The men raised the alarm with Joburg Child Welfare, who arrived to find the child running up and down the garden.
The neighbour, Clint, arrived and tried to calm him down. But the boy was terrified and shouting "I must hide" and wanting the strangers to get off the property.
"All he could talk about was World War 2, Pearl Harbour and the Nazis," said Clint.
"He was clearly not stupid... The way he was brought up he thinks the World War is still going on."
After spending several days in the hospital, "Tarzan's" father passed away, without saying much of anything about his life or his son. What he did say was not helpful enough for the boy's sake.
He admitted he had gone to great lengths to make sure no one knew about the boy's existence.
"I didn't want people to know that there was a little boy there," he said.
Although he did not explain his obsessive secrecy, he revealed that the boy's mother was a domestic worker with whom he had had an affair.
...
The father knew the potential damage he was doing by keeping the boy isolated, but he thought he could eventually "fix it" and give his son a normal life.
The boy currently resides in a child psychiatric ward in South Africa. The Austrian embassy has been involved in trying to locate the boy's mother, or any relative willing to adopt him.
Somehow, current President of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe makes the current US President look compassionate and informed. In the midst of a devastating epidemic of cholera that prompted George "Lame Duck" Bush to double the emergency aid to the country, Mugabe responds by declaring the epidemic is over.
A ferocious cholera epidemic, spread by water contaminated with human excrement, has stricken more than 16,000 people across Zimbabwe since August and killed more than 780. Health experts are warning that the number of cases could surpass 60,000, and that half the country’s population of 12 million is at risk.
With cholera spilling into neighboring countries, there are rising international calls for President Robert Mugabe to step down after 28 years in power. But he seems only to be digging in and even declared Thursday that the nation’s cholera epidemic had ended, just a day after the World Health Organization warned that the outbreak was grave enough to carry “serious regional implications.”
The outbreak is yet more evidence that Zimbabwe’s most fundamental public services — including water and sanitation, public schools and hospitals — are shutting down, much like the organs of a severely dehydrated cholera victim.