EIL Intercultural Learning - hiv & aids

Global Awareness Volunteers 2010

Piers Meynell — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 15:54:45 +0000

Volunteer Abroad

Nigeria

South Africa

Development Education

Global Awareness Programme

Travel Awards

Nigeria-South Africa Aids awareness

About EIL

Description:

The EIL Global Awareness Programme is an exciting training, volunteering and awareness programme focussing on HIV&AIDS. Each year 4 people are chosen to participate on this partially funded programme. Maeve, Emily, Gill and Paul took part to the 2010 Global Awareness Programme. As part of the programme, they received a training on “Understanding HIV in Development” as well as a training on Media and Campaigning skills. They volunteered for 8 weeks with a local project in Nigeria and South Africa working with people living with HIV&AIDS.

hiv & aids

Global Awareness Programme

EIL volunteer abroad

Nigeria

South Africa

Access to antiretroviral medication: the hard reality

emily_pemily7 — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 14:02:26 +0000

Prior to my departure I felt that I was very well prepared for working on a HIV and AIDS project, due to support and training given by EIL.

To prepare for volunteering in a local project in Nigeria, I attended training on "Understanding HIV in development and community responses" which gave me an interesting overview into the AIDS epidemic. I learned that HIV stands for Human Immunodeficiency and is a virus that results in the progressive deterioration of the immune system. AIDS stands for Acquired Immuno Deficiency Syndrome. A person is diagnosed with AIDS when their immune system is too weak to fight off infections. Being HIV-positive, or having HIV disease, is not the same as having AIDS. Many people are HIV-positive but don't get sick for many years. As HIV disease continues, it slowly wears down the immune system.

Without treatment, two-thirds of adults infected with HIV are likely to develop AIDS within ten years of being exposed to HIV. Unfortunately, in Nigeria this period is much shorter as people are exposed to tuberculosis and parasitic diseases such as malaria. Sadly, it also takes HIV to develop to AIDS is also shorter for children born with the virus.

HIV is found in many body fluids, including blood, semen, vaginal fluids (including menstrual blood) and breast milk. HIV transmission occurs when a sufficient quantity of these fluids get into someone else’s bloodstream. There are various ways a person can become infected with HIV. It is vital that everyone takes precautions to know their HIV status and to protect themselves and others from this virus. The only reliable way to discover if you are HIV positive is to get a blood test which can detect infection from a few weeks after the virus first entered the body.

Antiretroviral medication (ARV) medication can prolong the time between HIV infection and the onset of AIDS. Unfortunately as I learned in Nigeria, these medicines are not widely available in poorer countries around the world, and millions of people who cannot access medication continue to die. I was given an opportunity to accompany some of the Living Hope Care, care receivers to a hospital an hours drive away for them to receive their ARVs, to receive check-ups and to have secondary infections such as TB treated.

On this particular day I learned the patience, strength and stamina required to access the ARVs for these people. It was necessary to travel over an hour, crammed into an old bus on treacherous roads, to reach these free services (as there was nowhere in their State which provided the drugs). Upon arriving at the hospital those with TB and other air-borne diseases were required to wait outside in the unbearable heat. While others could go inside and receive some relief from electrics fans while there was intermittent electricity. Once you begin taking ARVs it is more detrimental to your health to stop taking them, then never to take them at all.

Therefore every two weeks, regardless of how sick our clients were or other plans they had, it was necessary for them to spend an entire day travelling and waiting at the state hospital in the city of Ibadon to receive their drugs. While waiting to see the doctor, I asked a friend if I could take her photograph, after she had spoken to me about her life story. Once she said I could I took my camera out of my bag, and immediately chaos ensued. As the group of about thirty people sitting with us jumped up and ran out of view. I reassured the group that I would not take any photographs, as aside from my friend, nobody else wanted anyone to learn of their HIV status. This fear was a result of living in a community and a world, which stigmatizes those living with HIV/AIDS. This experience really struck me as a concrete example of the reluctance of people to associate themselves with HIV and AIDS due to the stigmatization and discrimination they would meet from others in their community.

Within my first week in Nigeria I rushed to a run-down maternity health clinic to administer drugs to a baby born to a mother who was HIV+. These drugs are ARV prophylaxis drugs, which means that they attempt to prevent mother to child transmission of HIV. The reason our NGO had to deliver this treatment was that the maternity clinics did not have access to the drugs as they are not provided by the State.

Therefore it was necessary to travel to a hospital in a neighbouring state to register during pregnancy to receive the drugs. Our NGO kept the drugs until the baby was delivered, as they must be stored in a fridge, something most our clients did not otherwise have access to. Therefore at nine o’clock, in the pitch black, we rushed to the hospital where a mother lay exhausted, malnourished and frantic for her baby to receive the drugs which are more effective the sooner administered. The baby had been born a few weeks premature and because of the poor conditions of the maternity clinic, was going to have to vacate the bed and building within a few hours. In Ireland, this baby would have been in an incubator, however in Nigeria it was sent away from the overcrowded and understaffed maternity clinic despite the vulnerability of this tiny premature baby.

This horrifying experience taught me that poverty leads some people to receive poor health care. I was forced to recognise that in the Global South one-third of women have HIV+ babies (UNAIDS). Sadly, it has been recorded that “An estimated one-half million mothers die from pregnancy-related causes each year; at least 8 million suffer life long health problems linked to pregnancy and childbirth.”

Worldwide it is estimated that 15 million children under 18 have been orphaned as a result of AIDS. Around 11.6 million of these children live in sub-Saharan Africa. (Population Bulletin, 2005) In Nigeria alone there were 1,200,000 children who were orphaned due to AIDS in 2007. I was given many opportunities to provide vital services to such children and of these services a ‘teens camp’ was organised to provide four days of activities, meals and accommodation to over sixty children registered with the organisation. Sadly these children need special care which is not always provided as many had limited access to education, many were being abused and or suffered psychological trauma as a result of their experience of being orphaned.

In Good Hands at the HIV centre in Kayamandi

Gill Carter — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 11:13:37 +0000

I’m into week three at this stage, which means I'm starting to get used to the place. By no means would I say that I know the ins and out of Kayamandi, the shacks are like mazes with only tiny routes going through them all. My mental GPS is quite confused still when it comes to navigating around the shacks, shack E157 could be right in front of you and then, shack D89 beside it. So it's safe to say I'm still getting the hang of things.

The Legacy Centre has been a place of constant learning for me, everyday I see new things, hear new stories and learn that little bit more about life in Kayamandi, HIV, the people, the culture, it's never ending. Before I arrived, I had an expectation or mental image in my head about what the HIV centre in Kayamandi would be like and now that I'm here its a totally different picture to what I had expected. When you think HIV respite centre, you often think of a formal, reserved, hospital like scenario. However this Centre doesn't fit that description in my opinion. In my opinion it's not even a centre, I look at it as being as a house. A house where people come for rest, medication, food, and the Legacy staff speciality: care. I don’t look at Legacy as being a centre, it's more like a house and without sounding too cheesy it's a house with a family inside, a family made up of; sick people, carers, volunteers, gardeners, house keepers, nurses and more. It's not impersonal or over formal, it's a house where people are constantly talking, laughing, people are always in and out just to drop in and say hi. It's like any normal house, and clients see that, it has character, a personality which is happy, and peaceful and most of all; relaxed. It's a great place for people to rest and get better in. When you or I get sick, where is the place you want to go? Home, right? And HIV centre in Kayamandi is giving the best of both worlds by providing a home for people to get better in as well as care, medication, warmth, heat and friendship.

Times can be tough, people don't always get better and unfortunately some do pass away. Just last week, a young man came in but it was too late for a recovery, however, a few days later that young man's brother came in too say how thankful he was that his brother had come to the Legacy House. He had said he had been able to go to work knowing his brother was in good hands and wasn't in a cold shack, or by himself in a hospital, that man went to work knowing his brother was being looked after and was being cared for. So, is the HIV centre in Kayamandi making a difference? Most certainly, and I'm extremely happy to be a part of it.

Iyakubonana (goodbye in Xhosa!)

Gill

Promiscuity, the polio vaccine and HIV

Lynda Piper-Roche — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 17:37:37 +0000

When I chat with people about the prevelance of HIV & AIDS in Africa, usually their first response is to suggest that Africans are more promiscuous than Westerners. Columnist Kevin Myers, in the Irish Independent newspaper, described Africa as “almost an entire continent of sexually hyperactive indigents..." however, research highlighted by Helen Epstein in her comprehensive account of HIV & AIDS "The Invisible Cure" demonstrates that over the course of their lifetimes; the 'average' African has no more sexual partners than the 'average' Westerner.

Myers also stated that:"Africa is giving nothing to anyone – apart from AIDS ”. There are many theories on the original source of the virus, and while this may never be discovered, the reasons for its spread are necessary in order to combat the stigma surrounding HIV & AIDS.

The polio vaccine theory as the primary cause of HIV was first brought to light in a 1992 Rolling Stone article and was then expanded by former BBC journalist Edward Hooper in a 1999 book, titled "The River: A Journey Back to the Source of HIV and AIDS."

Evidence has shown that the original vaccine was not the primary cause of HIV but it has not ruled out that it may have fuelled the rapid spread of HIV. Tens of thousands of Africans were injected with the polio vaccine in the 1950s, a time when the same needle would have been used over and over again, without being cleaned. This may help to explain why HIV has infected so many people in Africa at such a fast pace. The "extensive use of reusable needles and syringes in mass-vaccination campaigns may also have played a part" in spreading the virus (Connor, London Independent).