'Bernadette's Story'
African Aids reality
by
Peter Kasule
HEAL Kampala
AidsMyth.com
25th Sept 2000
Having
worked as a volunteer at the National Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS
(NACWOLA) for a year due to lack of Employment, I was contracted to implement
a rural HIV/AIDS intervention project which I had helped to design. The project
is funded by Plan International and is known as “Succession Planning for Child
Support Project” The project seeks to support AIDS affected families especially
AIDS orphans live some reasonable normal life with less trauma.
During
the time I was a Volunteer at NACWOLA I discovered the Dissident community
on the Internet and registered as a contact. When I expressed these views
to the leaders it looked taboo. I started living like a secret agent. When
the project came up I took up the job to initiate the project. The project
location is 70 km from the NACWOLA headquarters, in the Infamous Luweero Triangle
where a terrible guerilla war raged for five years -1981-1985.
The
project had three components:
a) Memory Project directed at mothers to reveal their sero-status to their
children and plan with them for the children’s future orphanhood.
B) Counseling for families to cope with the devastating effects of HIV/AIDS
C) Income generating projects- small financial assistance to maintain subsistence
livelihood for the affected families.
Seventy miles away in Luweero I started fusing dissident information in counseling
and health education to 150 families and community counseling aides and counselors
and its when I came into contact with Bernadette. Bernadette is 48 so she
thinks a widow for the last 6 years, with three children. She has never gone
school or benefited from Adult learning the reason she can't say her age with
certainty.
Bernadette’s family links to HIV/AIDS dates back to the early eighties (1981).
In 1981 Our president His excellence Yoweri Kaguta Museveni launched a bloody
guerilla war in Luweero Bernadette's home area.
Bernadette
was a young lady, a second wife of Mr. Joe (not real name. In Africa we respect
the dead). Joe was a rich village man with six hundred heads of indigenous
local cattle. The couple belonged to the cattle keepers ethnic group of Rwandese
origin. Joe is thought to have come to Uganda as a refugee having fled as
a young man during the Rwanda genocide of 1959 where thousands of Tutsi ethnic
group was put to flight by the Majority Hutu.
Here Joe was trapped in another genocide of political intolerance and dictatorship.
His herd of cattle was totally decimated by both the government army and the
rebels of the National Resistance Army in their deadly blood thirst hide and
seek pillaging of entire villages that were left desolate.
The couple fled into the jungle where they spent six-month with their first
born largely depending on wild fruits. During the flight Joe lost contact
with his first wife and never so her again. Either she died or got married
in a far off village where she might be living thinking that her relatives
and family died in the war!
Stripped of home and livelihood the Joe couple with one child became a family
of fugitives. From the bush they settled in another village “in the liberated
areas” under the National Resistance Army (NRA).
In 1985 they returned to the ruins of what used to be their home. Thank God
they managed to return alive and their only possession was the pulse in their
veins, the fact that they had survived, the warmth of husband and child and
a large tract of bush land that used to be their kraal a home to six hundred
heads of cattle that were no more.
Here they began a precarious way of life. A life of poverty and disease. They
were left to till the land a way of life they had never lived. Bernadette
recounted to me how her husband failed to cope with the new life, a diet without
milk and meat and could not go to work as a cattle harder to recapture his
pastoral life though at a slave level. He saw this as dehumanizing considering
his status as a cattle owner. Their diet had reduced to beans and Maize flour
supplied by government and international NGOs that were accompanied with hoes
and seeds as a resettlement emergency scheme for war ravaged Luweero.
“ My husband used to wake up, sit on the verandah of our little hut and stare
in the distance and get lost in thought” Bernadette recalls. The major problem
to this survivor family was accessing health care. “The villages did not have
any medical personnel one had to walk 14km to reach a government health unit.
The unit did not have drugs and today does not have adequate essential drugs.
Sickly one would walk to the health unit, find no drugs and walk back home.
The only option was traditional healers and herbalist who also charged money
for their services.”
“My husband started falling sick, and I think life became difficult for him.
We lacked money to buy drugs and sometimes it would take days before having
any treatment. For three years my husband experienced ill health and could
not eat well. He was used to milk, gee, and meat and hated the poor food we
had to eat. He eventually died. Some people said it was AIDS but he was never
tested. I became scared, afraid and lonely. He died in 1994 and left me with
three children. The youngest was one year old.” Thus goes the story of Bernadette
and how AIDS came to her family.
Bernadette remained on her own and fending for her children. She sometimes
sells off some land to meet her needs such as medical expenses, school fees
for her elder so and daughter, clothing and sometimes to hire labor for cultivation
and petty trade. She now owns one cow. Two years ago she had persistent malaria
and was advised and encouraged to have an HIV antibody test. She turned out
positive. She says that when she tested she was told she is sick and she has
the virus and she thinks she has “slim” the local name for AIDS.
When I asked Bernadette about her situation after the death of her husband
and after her testing of HIV antibodies. She told me that after she had had
treatment for the Malaria that led her to test she has not had any serious
medical problem. Her problems are getting support for her chidden, how to
feed them, clothe them and educate them. Her last born is a bouncing young
child and she sees no reason to test the kid. She only wanted support to buy
two more cows worth US $ 400 in order to have some milk and sell some to help
her with small daily needs. She only worries about having AIDS and fears falling
sick especially when she does not have money for proper treatment.
Benadette’s situation and problems are not unique. Her conditions are like
of any family widow or not in her village and the neighboring communities.
Their problems are not caused by HIV/AIDS. HIV/AIDS only explains the lack
of capacity at individual, family, community and government level to deal
with real issues at stake. This family’s predicament is rooted in the permanent
disruption and dispossession they were subjected to by the very system that
is calling them to test for HIV/AIDS so that they can in ignorance feel guilty
and shameful for bringing calamity on themselves through a presumed sexual
pervasive act.
Many people in similar communities like Benadette's; Widows and widowers,
the married and unmarried, and the youth or young people share certain aspects;
· They live in rural areas as poor illiterate and ignorant people and are
war survivors.
· They have to rely on the hoe and their malnourished muscles to till poor
soils for a living.
· Due to poor diet, poor sanitation, expensive and poor drug administration
that is profit driven, they are prone to preventable diseases.
· Due to poverty and lack of appropriate health care system they depend on
syndromic approach medical care when they can afford, and Cost Sharing HIV
antibody Tests.
Under these prevailing circumstances the local people have to put up with
a propaganda that has scandalized sex. Couples no longer trust or have faith
in their spouses. They are living on threats, intimidation and suspicious
marital life as potential lethal partners capable of fatal injuring one another
in their marital beds. This fear and suspicion has been heightened by Illiteracy,
ignorance and "condomising" agencies funded by Western tax payers and the
pharmaceuticals.
Locally any person experiencing a persistent illness, is an AIDS suspect.
A quick search is done to find out if there is anybody who is dead or very
sick whom may be suspected to have had a sexual relationship with the person
in question. He will be then classified as already trapped by “slim”(AIDS)
and in short looked at as a moving copse or the “living dead”. By this criteria
Bernadette is a moving corpse.
So in this land of the wretched the AIDS war machine grinds on. Poverty, Ignorance
and their consequences continue to claim lives. The AIDS activist fighters
sound the battle cry of morbid data and appeal for more fat salaries for working
in stressful AIDS work. They need four wheel drive double cabin vehicles to
distribute condoms to the remotest villages to stem the scourge. Changing
sexual behavior is an emergency priority; all family planning gadgets need
to be in place to hault poverty due to producing many children. Research funds
to study the dynamics of HIV/AIDS in its rampaging communities with cultural
practices that are risky and may be deemed as a mode of transmission of HIV.
These must e conducted among poor illiterate and sometimes isolated communities
where the majority of the breadwinners can not afford a weekly supply of 1kg
of Sugar that costs less than one dollar. And finally in such communities
AIDS is a national security issue and is threatening US interest in Uganda.
The Fight goes on!
By Kasule Peter
HEAL Kampala
Email
palmuga@africaonline.co.ug
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