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Scourge's collateral damage
Aug 18, 2007 By: Susan O'Neill(Originally published May 8, 2006)
“Sex with me doesn’t cure AIDS”.
That’s the message conveyed in one of the many posters that hang on the classroom wall at the Sekela Centre in Ndola, one of several sites where the Sisters of the Sacred Heart run programs for youth who live in the mining town.
The poster depicts a young girl. She is crouching, huddled in a corner, her arms wrapped around her knees.
The image is haunting, as is the message on the poster than hangs beneath it.
“Today,” it says, “Seven children will be defiled and 10 women will be battered … you just might know one of them”.
The impact of HIV/AIDS in Zambia has had some tragic consequences for the nation’s children, 630,000 of whom have already been orphaned as a result of the pandemic.
By the year 2010, it is estimated that one-third of Zambia’s children will be AIDS orphans.
It is these Children Affected by AIDS (CABA) that the Sisters of the Sacred Heart are aiming to help in Ndola.
The organization of Catholic nuns has been working in Zambia’s Copperbelt region since 1990.
“AIDS was just rearing its ugly head here in the late 1980s,” said Elizabeth Mooney, the nun who runs Chinika House, the organization’s Ndola headquarters. “It was changing the face of things in the community and at that time we weren’t too sure where it was going.”
The sisters began running a home care program to care for the sick. But they soon realized a broader approach was required.
“We were at the end of the road … we had to move into prevention,” Ms. Mooney said. So the organization founded a number of programs for youths, including literacy classes, a sports-based education program for teens and a preschool program called CABA Play Therapy Group for orphans and children whose parents are dying. About 50 children between the ages of four and six attend the play group, which operates out of a converted railroad car adjacent to the Chishilano Multi-purpose Centre in the Nkwazi Compound, three days a week.
“It’s just to give them a few hours every week to be children. If you went down to the compound later today, you’d meet them carrying a drum of water and things,” Ms. Mooney said.
Ignatius Kayawe, program country director for the Southern African AIDS Trust, which funds the program thanks to a grant from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), said the play therapy group is intended to encourage child development and to help them cope with what they are experiencing at home.
“Children sometimes tend to be depressed and dysfunctional,” he said. “They see their parents die. They see their parents in a horrible state.”
So while the children are interacting, the volunteers are able to observe them as well.
Mr. Kayawe said the play group is also vitally important because it allows the youngsters a chance to have fun with other children.
“That is a major issue, allowing children to be children,” Mr. Kayawe said. “From an early stage they start acting adult.”
Perhaps that’s because they are facing adult issues, said Juliet Sichilongo, who has been working with the sisters in Ndola for the past seven years.
“It is, it is difficult (for the children to watch their parents as their health fails),” she said, noting that some children do receive counselling.
“Some of them are single and double orphans. And I don’t know if it’s acceptance, but they’ll just say, ‘Oh mom has died, daddy has died.’ They say it carelessly, but you can still see that somehow they are psychologically affected.
“Something really needs to be done,” said Ms. Sichilongo, who reported that children are also often victims of abuse.
“We’ve been trying as much as possible in the past six months (to teach them) not to allow anyone to call them over or even offer a sweet,” she said.
“Suddenly there came this belief, I think witch doctors told patients, the men, that if you have sex with a small girl then you’ll be cured. And the cases were all over the newspapers.
“The punishment (for defilement) wasn’t much. Every day you would hear about it,” she said, adding there was a case reported in the media recently of a man defiling a three-month old baby.
“There are some stories in the community that would just finish you, literally,” said Ms. Mooney, who maintained the impact of HIV/AIDS on the community of Ndola has been nothing short of devastating. “Devastating is the only word I can use for it.”
