When a South African woman met with a group of local women this fall, the conversation quickly turned to husbands and how much of the household labor load they shoulder.

"We're just so interested in finding out what your life is like, what your chores are like," Carol Greenspan of Mill Valley told Siphindile Tembe. "Does that husband of yours help you?" she asked, sparking laughter among about 50 mothers who gathered at Saint Mark's School in San Rafael for a benefit breakfast and to hear about Tembe's life in Maputaland.

"I see here men help their wives," Tembe replied. "In Africa, men doesn't. They come home and look at the paper."

Wearing an impala-skin shirt and a long black skirt, her hair in braids pulled back with a rainbow-colored headband, Tembe spoke in halting English to the Marin County mothers about dowries, polygamy, children who walk miles to school on empty bellies for the promise of their lone meal of the day, and how she met her husband, Jubilee Tembe, the principal of eSibonisweni Primary School in Maputaland.

The Tembes and their 8-year-old daughter, Beauty, recently visited Northern California for two weeks, spending much of their first trip to the United States at Saint Mark's, eSibonisweni's sister school.

Since 2000, parents and teachers at the private, nonsectarian kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school in Terra Linda have raised money to build classrooms at eSibonisweni and have sent clothing, shoes, books and school supplies. The Saint Mark's community also has paid for tuition, uniforms and food for eSibonisweni's growing population of orphans.

Saint Mark's parents so warmly welcomed the Tembes and lavished them with so many gifts that Siphindile Tembe felt at a loss to reciprocate. "They want to share," she said after the breakfast meeting. "They want to give. They always giving. It is bad to say, 'thank you, thank you,' and you don't have anything to give."

Siphindile Tembe's talk raised money to help feed eSibonisweni students a daily meal of maize porridge and beans. Tembe said the meal draws the children to school.

"Because of HIV, AIDS, there are many orphans in our area," she told the mothers. "Our children go to school without having something to eat."

Set in rural Zululand on land once part of Tembe Elephant Park near South Africa's border with Mozambique, the school's some 800 students, or learners as they call them, live in a community with 80 percent unemployment and an AIDS epidemic that has orphaned about 150 of them.

The Tembes were as surprised about Saint Mark's active Parents' Association as the Saint Mark's mothers were about South African men taking multiple wives. Just sending their children to school is a feat for eSibonisweni parents, many of whom never had the chance to go to school themselves. So the Tembes were shocked and delighted to see involved parents hovering around the San Rafael school and returned to South Africa hoping to inspire parents to get more involved with their learners' educations.

Though Siphindile Tembe's husband is a member of the royal family, she told the Marin mothers she juggles working as a seventh-grade teacher, caring for her five children, looking after her mother-in-law, cooking, cleaning and plowing fields for vegetables.

"In olden days," she told the mothers, "women weren't allowed to go to work. Their work was to look after babies. The women of South Africa are very strong, really, because they do all the work alone."

For a time, she said, South African men had to travel to distant villages to find work. "The husband," she said, "maybe came home in the summertime, give you a baby and go back.

"Women, you are the hearts of the home. It's our duty being a woman to cook, feed, carry water with babies on our backs."

She said women sing while working because singing gives them more physical power to do the demanding labor.

One of the Saint Mark's mothers asked about polygamy. Tembe said her father, a chief, had eight wives. "Nowadays," she added, "that cannot happen because everything is very expensive."

Some South African men, though, do have as many as five wives today, she said.

She said polygamy hurts children who sense that their fathers prefer one wife over another – usually the wife taken most recently. "It's not good for us or our children," she said. "Nowadays we don't like it."

Annette Perry-Carrera of San Rafael asked Tembe how she and her husband met. Their marriage was not arranged, Tembe said. She said she met Jubilee when she traveled to his community looking for a teaching job in 1983. "We met; we dated; then we got married," she said.

But, first, her parents had to pay the lobolo, a dowry or bride price. "What about the dowry?" Tembe asked the Marin mothers. When she heard that American parents need not pay for their sons' brides, she said, "I wish I could take my boys and bring them here. If you have boys, you pay a lot, especially in the royal family – about 16 cows."

With four boys, that's 64 cows.

And what about her husband, a Marin mother asked, does he have more than one wife?

"It's me only," Tembe responded, shaking her finger. "It's affordability."

Like many American women, Tembe would like her sons to do chores their father does not do.

She has taught them to plow the vegetable fields. "They should cook. They should wash. They should do everything," she said. "It's too much for women."

At the end of her first trip to the United States, Tembe said what struck her most about Americans was a more egalitarian relationship between men and women. "I like seeing men helping his wife."

Asked if she had asked her husband to help her more, Tembe responded: "I won't tell him because he's here. He sees men helping in their houses."

Tax-deductible donations to feed eSibonisweni School children can be sent to Saint Mark's School, 39 Trellis Drive, San Rafael, 94903, with eSibonisweni marked on the memo line.

Are you receiving Express, our free daily e-mail edition? See a sample and sign-up for Express.