When the train carrying Adolphine and her two boys pulled into the Cape Town station at two on a blustery, unseasonably chilly Sunday afternoon in November 1998 they were exhausted and hungry. For Adolphine the prospect of seeing Sepano again still felt like an impossible dream. Despite her excitement, her heart was in her mouth. Would he be there waiting? What if he hadn't received the message informing him of their arrival?

“When we stepped off the train, my eyes were everywhere, but I didn't see him”, she recalls. She took in the strange, rather inhospitable surroundings. “I had his pastor's landline telephone number.” With trembling hands she scrabbled for the coins Sepano had sent her for a public telephone. “I used them all, but there was no answer. The boys and I went up and down along platform 24 – I’ll always remember that's where the train stopped – and searched other platforms, but there was no sign of the person I most longed to see. Eventually it was four o’clock and it was getting colder. I spread a wrap on the cold concrete and told the children to sleep a little.”

Again she walked up and down one platform after the other. Looking at her watch, she saw it was 5 pm and the station, which had been busy until then, was becoming gradually almost deserted. “I found a place that was quite warm with more protection from the wind that was starting to cut through the clothes I had been wearing ever since I left Lilongwe. I asked passers-by if there was a rest house somewhere.”

Dejected, she returned to where she’d left the children, but found them gone. Panic gripped her; Ilunga was only three and Joseph was eight and she had heard about the high crime rate in South Africa. “I sat on my haunches, holding my head in my hands, too anxious even to cry.

“My heart skipped a beat when I looked up and saw a tall man, gaunt but smiling, walking towards me. The children were with him. Sepano was so thin that he was in many ways a shadow of the man I had last seen in December 1996, but I still would have recognised the husband I loved anywhere. Although I was exhausted I jumped up like a child.