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Cultural obstacles affect treatment
Aug 18, 2007 By: Susan O'Neill(Originally published May 8, 2006)
Leonard Kampamba’s body is beginning to fail him.
He is insufferably thin.
The whites of his eyes are yellow and his voice is barely audible as he talks about the illness that has plagued him for months. “For now I am feeling just OK,” says Mr. Kampamba, who is seated on a bamboo mat on the ground, resting on a piece of dirty foam that leans against his modest home in the Mulenga Compound in Kitwe. “I am feeling very weak.”
The 45-year-old father of four claims to be suffering from tuberculosis.
However, his caregivers believe he is suffering from HIV/AIDS, commonly referred to in Zambia as the slimming disease.
Mr. Kampamba started taking TB medication in November, but his health hasn’t improved much.
He is not yet prepared to be tested for HIV. “I started feeling fever yesterday,” he tells his caregiver, Helen Kambili, a volunteer with the community-based Twafwane Christian Community Care Centre. Twafwane is a Bemba phrase that translates as, ‘let us help each other.’
The group provides homecare to residents living in the compound. Life here isn’t easy.
“There are tough challenges, I can assure you,” says Phidelis Pailande, another of the organization’s volunteers. “It really strikes us when we go out in the field.”
About 23,000 people, many of them ill, live in the compound.
Twafwane’s 28 volunteers visited almost 1,300 sick residents during the month of February. One of their greatest challenges is encouraging people to overcome their fear of being stigmatized if they test positive for HIV/AIDS, Mr. Pailande says.
“They think they will be the laughing stock of the community if they are HIV positive. That has greatly hindered our program,” he says.
It is estimated that 16.5 per cent of the country’s 10.9 million people are living with HIV/AIDS.
In fact, the Zambian Ministry of Health’s website notes that everyone in the country is either affected or infected by the virus, which killed 89,000 Zambians in 2003.
At the end of 2003, UNAIDS reported that 820,000 adults were infected.
The main cause of transmission in Zambia, as elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, is unprotected heterosexual sex.
And, because HIV is a sexually transmitted infection, it is often assumed that those living with the virus brought it upon themselves.
And that stigma often hampers prevention and care, says Ignatius Kayawe, country program officer with the Southern African AIDS Trust (SAT).
“Stigma is still contributing to deaths,” says Mr. Kayawe, who notes that programs such as the one run by Twafwane are invaluable in combating the spread of the virus.
The Twafwane project is one of the 25 projects currently being funded by SAT in Zambia.
The Johannesburg-based organization was created by the Canadian Public Health Association in 1990 and is funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).
“Our role is to facilitate - to help our partners work out their vision and strategic plan,” Mr. Kayawe says, noting that SAT also funds programs in Malawi, Zimbabwe and Mozambique.
CIDA is contributing $30 million toward SAT over five years, funding that comes to an end next March.
“We keep our fingers crossed and our knees to the floor that we will get another five years again,” Mr. Kayawe says, adding there is still a long way to go in combating HIV/AIDS in Zambia.
