 |
Search : | ||
|
|||
News
|
News stories
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
25 September 2001 By Solveig Olafsdottir in Harare A woman falls on the ground, clutching her stomach. She wails. A Zimbabwe Red Cross volunteer immediately gets on her knees and takes her in her arms. She embraces the sick woman, comforts her.The two women are members of a HIV/AIDS support group in Zvimba province, and are acting to demonstrate to foreign Red Cross visitors the roles of a home care facilitator and her "client" - as the Red Cross volunteers prefer to call their HIV/AIDS patients. Some twenty women, all members of the support group, surround the two, clapping their hands. "When you fall sick, you are not alone, because the Red Cross is always there to help you. When your stomach is upset, when your head hurts, the Red Cross comes and relieves you from your suffering," they sing. Every Thursday the women gather in their meeting place to support each other, share problems, laugh together, care for each other. Some have to walk up to an hour to get there, others live nearby. But they also have more practical reasons to get together. "We make our own soap here, cut it up in bars and sell it in our community," one woman explains. "When one in our group gets sick, we use the money we earn to buy them food and medicine. And if someone dies, we give money to their family." They also care for children in their community whose parents have died of AIDS related diseases. On Thursdays, every woman brings some ingredients, and then they pool together to make porridge to feed orphans under five. Red Cross home-based care facilitators also join their weekly meetings, in addition to visiting them and their families three to four times a week. The visitors, who represent Red Cross Red Crescent Societies in East and West Africa as well as the International Federation Secretariat in Geneva, are here to learn. The Zimbabwe Red Cross has been running a HIV/AIDS home-based care programme since 1992, and now serves as a model for other countries in the continent looking towards launching similar projects. To date, there are more than 500 Red Cross volunteers in seven out of eight provinces in the country providing services to 5,000 people living with AIDS. The reality of the HIV/AIDS pandemic is clearly felt at the Zvimba Red Cross branch. The population of the province is 96,000 and their home-based care facilitators take care of nearly 500 clients. "That means one care facilitator for each fifteen clients," says Sylvia Mandissiya, provincial programme coordinator for the Zvimba Red Cross branch. "We are really stretching the resources of our volunteers to the limit. And we have more than 7,500 orphans to take care of, and child headedhouseholds are on the increase. This is really difficult for us, because at the same time we want to scale up our activities." That is exactly what brought the 30 Red Cross Red Crescent leaders and officials together in Harare for a meeting 16-20 September: how to implement the pledge which 52 African National Societies committed to, by signing the Ouagadougou Declaration exactly one year ago - namely to massively scale up their response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic in terms of advocacy, prevention, care and mitigation. What they have witnessed in Zvimba province hits right home. During their four days meeting, the Red Cross representatives have discussed frankly and openly how they can scale up their work in the fight against HIV/AIDS with their limited resources, volunteers who often are vulnerable themselves, and in a culture where people may suffer discrimination and stigmatization in association with the disease. "They are all too aware of the urgency of the matter - in Southern Africa alone, one out of every four person is living with HIV/AIDS. All over Africa people need to change their behaviour to stop the spread of the disease - and the Red Cross Red Crescent must act as the messenger working with people on a community level, from the grassroots and up," said Bekele Geleta, Head of the International Federation's Africa Department. National Society leaders agreed on key messages to bring back with them: immediate action by prioritizing and focusing on existing resources, expanding Red Cross influence in the community through local and international partnerships, to ensure community ownership of programmes - and last but not least to take care of our own. "A lot needs to be done in order to match expectations and reality. But we need concrete action, and we need to act now. The essence of scaling up is to have a substantial impact. That is what we have to do - even if it means we have to shy away from our traditional ways of working, and enter new territories," said Geleta |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
