Today was a hard day

Monday, 6 September 2010

We made another visit to a gathering of three of our villages. We traveled over an hour south from our base on the main, paved road. Turning off the pavement, we bounced and cajoled our way another 30 minutes through a very densely populated area to our destination, waving at the exuberant children along the way. After the traditional greetings, prayers, dances and speeches, they asked the orphans to all stand up.

In these three villages, the population is 6,398. In these three villages, there are 296 orphaned boys and girls. In these three villages, there are 105 guardians caring for these children who have no mother or father. In four of the villages here, GAIA has 12 Community Care Givers (village women who help care for the people with HIV AIDS, as well as lending a hand with the orphans). In these three villages, I failed to ask the number of HIV AIDS patients there are, but we were told that there are 28 patients who currently have Kaposis Sarcoma (KC). We went back down the road a short ways to visit one.

Her name is Mtima ("Heart"). She is 38 years old. She is sitting on a mat, legs extended, leaning on her hut, nursing her five month old daughter, Jacqueline. Her right leg and foot, not covered by her chitenje, are covered with sores and grossly swollen. That is where the KC has erupted. She speaks softly and slowly through our interpreter. She has two married daughters - Frances, 18 and Elisa, 20 - who live nearby, and a school age son (maybe 12 or so years old) named Zinane. They all come to meet us as well. When she was pregnant, she was required by the government to be tested for HIV. Tragically, she learned that she was HIV+. Upon learning this news, her husband divorced her and left; she has not seen him since. She has had her three older children tested for HIV. They are all negative. She cannot have the baby tested until she is 18 months old. Mtima is encouraged to breast feed exclusively for 6 months, and then stop. It will take until Jacqueline is 18 months old before the mothers antibodies are gone and the test will give a true picture of the baby’s status. Mtima has now started a regimen of ARV medication, which she has to walk to the district hospital - several kilometers away - each month to get them. The KC is painful, and causes numbness in her leg. She indicates that she is also experiencing heart pain as well. She struggles to feed her children, getting help from her two older daughters, but it is not enough. In spite of all of this, she has hope for the future.

The statistics I relayed above are for only 3 particular villages in Southern Malawi. The story of Mtima is one that is repeated in villages everywhere. I don’t know the greater statistics of how many villages, how many orphans, how many with HIV. I only know that the numbers are many, the need is great. And yet the children smile and laugh. And the women sing and dance.