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Charity
Chase
Home-based Care Group and Kondwa Centre
In April this year, I travelled Lusaka, to do some fieldwork for my
anthropological university study back in Denmark. My focus was to
interview people affected by HIV/AIDS such as grandparents, aunts
and uncles and other family who end up taking care of orphaned
children; and to see how they experience changes in family networks
as the disease spreads and how they handle the impact the disease
has on their lives.
I
got in touch with a Home-Based Care Group (HBC) located in N´Gombe
who have their office at the Roma Parish Cathedral. This Home-Based
Care Group was formed in November 1997 by six people because of
HIV/AIDS – to many people were sick, there was a lack of health
centres and hospital conditions were not sufficient and people were
being discharged when there was no hope for survival.
They first started it as a project with no outside help and their
main purpose was to visit the sick and support the primary
caregivers who take care of the sick 24 hours a day.
In the beginning, the Care Group had no funding but after two years
as they proved they were self sufficient they started getting
support from the national office and now also from other
organisations. They have gone from 6 to 45 secondary
caregivers/volunteers and about 265 patients on the register – all
affected by AIDS.
They concentrate their help in the local community where they
themselves live. It is easier this way to get people to ask for help
and to open up and talk about AIDS and other problems such as other
diseases and poverty as they know the volunteers from their local
surroundings and therefore feel more comfortable. The people that
volunteer are usually women who want to help in their own community
and very often they are also affected by poverty or disease in their
family and are in the same situation as the people they help.
The Care Group operates in sections and divides the patients between
them. They help as secondary caregivers to give the primary
caregivers a break, and do things such as bathing the patient,
cooking food, washing and sweeping – normal household chores. If
the family have no food they try to provide that as well as
clothing. The care is holistic and tries to fulfil both physical
needs such as food, medication, transport etc and also psychosocial
needs such as memory books for their children, which also helps them
open up about the disease.
The Care Group take the patients on their programme as they come and
if patient dies and that person was the breadwinner of the family,
they help the family with food for at least three months until they
start finding other ways.
Now the HBC has also been selected to monitor the people on ARV
medication in the community and also networks with clinics so they
can send the patients for counselling, tests etc.
One of the newest things the HBC works with is the memory work which
is a project which is being developed to help the people with
HIV/AIDS to create something their children can remember them by
such as a memory book. In these books, family history is recorded
and they have memory boxes where pictures and precious things can be
kept for the children to inherit.
One of the women, Angela Malik, who helped start up HBC also started
a day-care centre “Kondwa Centre” in Old N´Gombe in September 2000.
She saw how the children in the community weren’t going to school
and that many of them only had one meal a day as the caregivers
couldn’t provide for them. At first the main priority of the centre
was to feed the children and later pre-schooling came into life to
fill in the time between breakfast and lunch.
The day-care is mainly for orphaned children who have lost one or
both their parents and who live with other family-members who have
difficulties providing food for them. The Kondwa Centre works
together with HBC who, as they work in the local community, are able
to identify the children that are in the most need of help. Usually
the children come from a family who is already on the HBC-help
programme. Every year Mrs Malik finds funding for the children about
to start school. These funds normally come from organisations but
also private funding comes from families and missionaries. Right now
there are about 85 children between 3 and 8 years of age at the
centre and hopefully, because of expansion of the buildings, more
children can soon start.
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September 2005