HIV issue

As I come to a close here in Kenya I am still learning new things everyday. I love the fact that each of my days are totally different, it keeps me fresh and excited to continue. Something that has been an overriding theme being here though is HIV. I have seen it impact so many of my students and community members- nearly 50% of them are affected in some way.

HIV is reported to have been first introduced to Kenya in 1985, and from that time most people didn’t know what it was, or the severity of it. All they knew was that people were dying in huge numbers. Until the last 10 years or so HIV was a death sentence. When I talk to Hannah, the beautiful director of Mogra Star, she has shocking accounts of life at that time. She said many people in the community would commit suicide after finding out they have HIV because the community would ostracize you so badly. In Mathare Slum, half of the people living there are HIV +and have been chased from their family homes in the rural areas. Life in the slum is awful, and more expensive than life in rural areas but they cannot stay in the areas because of stigma the family would have with an infected member of the family. Additionally, it is usually the husbands who infect the woman, but it is also the husbands that chase the wives away. Until recently, nobody had proper medication so if they continued living with HIV they had horrible affects of the body including thinning hair and skin and weight loss and uncontrolled bowels. It eventually leads to tuberculosis so that is what victims usually die of.
In today’s society, there has been a huge improvement in the way HIV is controlled. Though there are no drugs to cure the infection, there are drugs that control it and allow the person to function properly. There are many clinics that provide the drugs for free, however they must be taken with substantial food which is where the problems continue. Especially in the slum, it is hard to eat enough food to make the drugs help you, rather than causing additional liver damage and other issues. I mostly dealt with those people, who have access to the drugs but not to food. It is great that our school started a feeding program which allows the children to have a balanced meal, and if the mothers come in and volunteer in the kitchen they can also receive the meal. There is still a lack of hope among the woman though, and they need a lot of support in order to revive their hope and be shown they can be upstanding citizens.

One of my students is a very bright young man and he gives me a lot of hope. He comes from an incredibly needy family- he has a single mom of 6 boys, and she is HIV +, along with the youngest boy. Luckily none of the others were infected. The mother was one of the victims of HIV towards the beginning when nobody knew how to treat it properly. She was in a very poor state, flirting with TB and nobody had hope that she would make it. Mamma Hannah knew what needed to be done though and she would bring her food and help to bathe her, eventually bringing her health back into decent shape. With the increased availability of ARV drugs, over time the mother of 6 was able to increase her health even more to a sustainable level. Today, she is a huge inspiration to woman throughout all of Mathare Slum. She does HIV counseling for woman and, helps to run her own small business and raises 6 boys. She has raised her boys so well, they are good and caring kids and know how to work hard and focus on the important matters. The one I am closest to has high dreams of working hard and getting himself and his family out of Mathare. It is not an ideal place to stay but most people are forced to, but he has enough encouragement that he knows if he works hard they can move out. He has learned a lesson from seeing his mother suffer, and the effects that her decisions made for their family, and he knows he doesn’t want to live that type of life either.

Stories like this give me great hope, but they are fairly rare. I am happy to meet these people and see how well they do, but there are many more that are in desperate situations barely grasping onto life. HIV is a horrible disease and the best prevention is argued about on all fields. However, it cannot be argued that the most effective treatment is the ARV drugs, which require regular food and many people are unable to get that food. That is the sad part, lack of food can kill so many people… oh that’s another whole issue I won’t get started on! Pray for all those suffering, this world is a dark place and we must recognize it in order to alleviate some of it