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Zimbabwe: Be Real, Plan Your Life And Family
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 Published by the government of Zimbabwe |
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The Herald (Harare)
OPINION
12 July 2008
Posted to the web 14 July 2008
Harare
Are you being real? One lesson living with HIV should have taught all of us in this generation is that it is important to plan our lives and our families.
Of course the master plan for those of us, who believe, rests with our Lord, who created us, for a divine purpose, but we can surely do our best to do that which we can, along the way.
Gone are the days when women were all about breeding as many children as they possibly could.
Yes, there was and is nothing wrong with this practice, because thanks to it, many of us are glad to have sisters and brothers and enough nephews and nieces to fill a small bus today; those people who are always at our side ready to offer a shoulder when the need arises.
There is nothing wrong with this as long as it's done after careful planning because it is a fact that the advent of HIV has seen the life-expectancy for most Zimbabweans decline to below 40 years.
Many of our parents, sisters, brothers, uncles, aunt, colleagues and friends did not manage to see their children beyond Grade One as a result of AIDS.
Today in all our families there are children we are looking out for who don't even remember their father or mother's face because they were so young when they died.
All of us today pray fervently that the Gods deal with us kinder and we can be around to see our children finish school. Very few believe they will see their grandchildren, even though it is that, which we must learn to challenge.
By fire by force and with careful planning and enough faith, why not?
God has the ultimate decision but a person can still play their part by planning.
Today when women have gone out and conquered boardrooms and courtrooms, showing that they are much more than breeding factories, some of these things can change.
When women are now in a position to decide just how big a family they can cope with, which has resulted in many of them opting for smaller and easier to manage families, surely life expectancy should be higher.
When many women have realised the importance of pre and post-natal care and healthy living, which has resulted in them even standing up to protect themselves from sexually transmitted infections, including HIV surely there is some hope.
Many women today have the information that they need to make a choice about their health and lives and they should be using it.
There should be no excuse for those who keep failing to get it, many of us today, just a day after the world commemorated World Population Day, who are just breeding, irrespective of whether this is good for their health or the baby's.
There are many who put their own lives at risk to please systems and structures and it is such women we out to be reaching at this point in time.
Yes, women should not die giving life to a baby, our health systems should prevent this but women also should think before they just conceive.
There are many who are having so many children that they would need five jobs to take care of them yet they don't have even one job.
An image comes to mind of a woman, that I came across recently; coughing so badly that everyone around could not help but feel sorry for her poor chest and body for going through so much pain.
She was carrying a year old baby on her back and holding the hand of a three-year old and a five-year old while a six year old walked by her side.
She was definitely not well and as I offered to help her with the youngest baby, I realised something else: she was pregnant.
I politely enquired about her pregnancy and she told me that she did not want to keep having babies, as she had been advised against it at the clinic but her husband would not let her take family planning tablets and would not agree to using condoms though the two had been living with HIV for some time.
As I write she has had her baby, very big girl who the father with the help of relatives is looking after, is taking care of, but the mother is no more.
The strain of the pregnancy and some complications she had towards the end proved too much for her and she died.
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She was also not tested for HIV, thus she never had the chance to prolong her life and to prevent her unborn baby from becoming infected. Hopefully the little one will be one of the lucky ones.
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