Maseru, Lesotho – she sits on a bed, the only furniture in a two room hut in a hilly village some 40 kilometer outside the capital city. She trembles and looks expectantly at the nurse that has come bearing painkillers.
At 30 years of age, Zodina Dlamini is one of the 43 percent of Swaziland’s population infected with HIV/AIDS. She is on anti-retroviral drugs and receives additional pain-killers and help with household chores like washing and cleaning through a USAID-funded regional project working in Swaziland and nearby Lesotho.
Dlamini’s sister died due to HIV/AIDS just a week ago, after being cared for by the grandmother, Gococo Zwane. Now Zwane takes care of her son, the girl’s uncle, who has not tested HIV-positive because the nurse could not find a vein to test his blood.
“He’s very ill- he has all the signs of HIV,” Nonsa Gule, a nurse working with a Salvation Army clinic in the village of Mbuluzu. “And this girl,” she adds meaning Dlamini, “she just found out she is sick three weeks ago. And we just buried her sister last week.”
Gule spends half her time at the Mbuluzu Clinic, testing and counseling patients for HIV/AIDS. The rest of the time she goes from home to home with soothing words and bearing painkillers, anti-nausea drugs, vitamins, and some food now and again.
Often her visits coincide with those of the community volunteers that come to help HIV/AIDS patients and their families with household chores. The volunteers also visit orphans, and families of vulnerable children.
Providing home care for some 200 adult HIV/AIDS patients in Swaziland, Salvation Army is one of more than a dozen grantees funded by PACT, which carries out the regional USAID program. This project has trained 60 nurses like Gule during its two years in action. It has also supported 40 caregivers who assist with household chores and psychological support to some 1,000 orphans or young children at risk of HIV-infection.
“There are a lot services missing in countries like this,” said Grace Masuku, coordinator for PACT in Swaziland. There is no social welfare system, so all the support has to be provided by the communities.”
In Lesotho, PACT funds similar projects. One of its grantees is the Society for Women Against AIDS in Lesotho (SWAALES), a local non-governmental organization (NGO) that provides care for about 300 children in 10 villages. It targets children that do not have enough money to pay for school fees, and those needing health or psychological care.
SWAALES this year trained 22 community coordinators and monitors who identify the children to receive care, train additional community members, and keep track of HIV/AIDS patients and their needs at the community level. Other PACT-supported projects run similar activities throughout the country.
“PACT is our project at the local level,” said Joan Atkinson, coordinator for the USAID regional project in Lesotho. “They give sub-grants to local NGOs and other groups to do all sorts of things, mainly aiming to support home care for adult patients and assistance to orphans and vulnerable children.”
The USAID regional program for HIV/AIDS also supports activities at the national level. It works with ministries of health and national HIV/AIDS patients, tests pregnant women, provides mother to child prevention services, and cares for patients, among other activities.
