An HIV-positive mother in Swaziland
Anna Groff and Rachel Lapp Making the quick gestures of grooming common to young people everywhere, 22-year-old Phumile runs a hand over her hair and smooths her blouse as she talks with visitors. For more than a month, she has struggled to have the energy to hold her son, born three months ago. While at first she had the strength to feed and care for him, she now relies on her grandmother to watch the baby. Phumile's grandmother appears in the doorway of the cement-block hut, coming in from the courtyard of the rural family's homestead, with an infant secured below her stooped shoulders with a wide cloth. With painful difficulty, the elderly woman unties the bundle and places her great-grandson next to Phumile. Though the small baby cries out, Phumile is too weak to pick him up. "What I miss most," she says, "is washing his clothes." Today, women account for 50 percent of the estimated 40 million people worldwide living with HIV/AIDS. In Africa, women age 15 to 24 are the people most likely to be infected with HIV. In addition, the tasks of caring for people with AIDS and those orphaned by the disease are most likely to fall to women and girls. Phumile, living in the Boyane district far from a center for women's health services or even a clinic, is distant from programs for prevention and treatment. She does not take anti-retroviral drugs. She relies on her aging grandmother to care for her and receives no support from the baby's father. Yet she takes some strength from visits from a community member — a member of the local Zionist church who was trained by Faith Bible School (FBS) to provide support to Phumile and her grandmother, to give instruction to those taking care of HIV/AIDS patients and to give instructions about nutrition and dietary supplements that FBS has arranged to distribute.
Anna Groff is a junior at Goshen College, and Rachel Lapp is the Goshen College director of public relations.
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