Publications
Partners
Zephany Nurse, or Miché Solomon, will be celebrating her first Christmas as someone known to the world by both these names. It will also be her first Christmas to include her biological family.
“It’s going to be something new and different, but I’m looking forward to it,” Miché tells us.
She learnt in 2015 that she was really the child of Morne and Celeste Nurse who’d been abducted as a baby from Groote Schuur hospital in 1997. The woman who raised her, Lavona Solomon, was sentenced to 10 years in jail for kidnapping.
When the shocking history came to light, Miché opted to live with the man she knew as her father growing up, Michael Solomon.
In the meantime Miché has become the mother of a daughter and a son. A court interdict which prevented her true identity from being published, was lifted earlier this year. Shortly afterwards her book titled Zephany was published in which she tells how she’d experienced and processed the past.
“I’ll be spending Christmas with three sets of family,” Miché tells us. “It’ll be my biological family, Lavona’s family and Michael’s family. I have to really manage my time on the day.
“It’s weird; sometimes I feel like I have to divide myself up between everyone.”
She says to her Christmas has always been about the birth of Christ, as well as family and togetherness.
“The gifts actually are just about seeing how excited the kids get when they open them.”
She says it’s also important to teach children about the real reason Christmas is celebrated and why we exchange gifts.
She plans to go to a church service on Christmas morning and thereafter visit her different families where they’ll be sharing out gifts.
“In the past five years on Christmas day I visited Lavona in prison. I want things to be different this year, so I won’t see her but I will talk to her on the phone.”
