 |
 |
 |
|||||||||||||||
|
Tara Finglas, Global Awareness Programme participant in 2006, writes about just some of the little battles she witnessed in the bigger fight against HIV & AIDS.
Having just completed a degree in Communications & Journalism at the Dublin Institute of Technology, I was deciding which Master programmes to apply for the following year. But meanwhile, I started thinking about volunteering again. I had done some volunteering in the past at the Paralympic Games in Athens and in Madagascar with Habitat for Humanity in 2004.
In Madagascar I was part of a 12-member team, working on site every day to build a house for a local family. Digging foundations, mixing cement and brick laying was hard work, but it was worth it to see the smiles spread wide across each of the family member’s faces when their new house was complete.
I wanted to do something useful and to use some of the skills that I had learnt in four years of college, so I decided to get involved in one of the biggest issues affecting millions of people around the world – HIV & AIDS.
In Ireland, in the region of 4,000 people are living with HIV, so when compared with other countries the problem is on a very different scale. By volunteering in South Africa I hoped that I could help to break down some of the barriers surrounding the illness, and demonstrate that people do care.
There is no one-step solution to winning the war on HIV & AIDS but a wave of initiatives can help. As a volunteer on the EIL Global Awareness Programme I was sent to South Africa where HIV & AIDS is a major problem, with more than five million people living with the virus. The programme focuses on UN Millennium Development Goal No 6: to stop the spread of HIV & AIDS, Malaria, TB and other major diseases.
I worked with the South African Red Cross, which has many different projects to tackle HIV & AIDS and to help those affected. I began work on a Summer Camp for Orphans of HIV. The children were from the local Squatter village in Ottery. Many of the children were small and appeared no more than seven or eight years old. I was shocked to learn that they were much older, some of them even teenagers.
Although one or both of their parents may have died due to being HIV positive, some children are lucky and are not HIV positive. However, they are malnourished because of an unbalanced diet which consists of pap, a porridge-like food. For the children who are HIV positive, eating this alone means that they are likely to contract further illnesses. This vicious cycle results from poverty and is so difficult to witness. All they want to do is play, but some children can’t be children when their daily life means fighting an ongoing war against HIV & AIDS.
Seeing some children running around playing games showed me that although HIV may be part of life, it does not always dictate how they live their lives. Stories of great courage abounded, such as relatives wheeling seriously ill people, who are in the last stages of HIV, to the clinics to volunteer. Home Base Care volunteers in the Free State walk bare foot for more than three hours to reach people who are bed ridden and too sick to leave their houses.
One such volunteer, Seitlheko Molefe, told me: “Because of the Red Cross we are trained to take absolute care of people. Here with the Red Cross we visit people at home who are sick. It’s very worth it. Talk to them when they become well and teach them that they can go into their community to assist people who we cannot reach.”
Schools are the first place where young South Africans learn about HIV. I went from school to school with the South African Red Cross Peer Education programme teaching classes about safe sex and HIV & AIDS. Despite the stigma associated with sex and HIV, the classes were open in talking about their lives and asking questions.
Unlike other volunteer programmes the Global Awareness Programme goes much further with sustainable volunteering. Since I have been back in Ireland my job has been to highlight the situation about HIV & AIDS as it stands in South Africa and Ireland. The bottom line is that by volunteering, we can help to make a difference and play a part in working for the greater good.
