Nairobi — A Catholic priest has founded a home to care for terminally sick Aids patients. It is an effort that combines true Christian concern, modern innovation and traditional hospitality in the bid to cope with a national tragedy.
One resident occupies each house, along with a relative, amid a comfort and spaciousness most people in Swaziland, the small landlocked kingdom of Southern Africa, have never experienced. But the price of admission to these homes is high, and no Swazi would willingly pay the price: a resident must be incapacitated by Aids. The cohabiting relative resides as his or her caregiver.
A team of church and lay volunteers under the leadership of a local Catholic priest and educator, Fr. Larry McDonnell, have erected 15 units, with 10 more awaiting construction in an innovative community that combines traditional Swazi hospitality with the latest applied theories in Aids treatment and prevention. The complex is noteworthy for another reason: While only able to offer accommodation to a mere fraction of Aids sufferers in Swaziland, it presents a prototype for imitation elsewhere in the kingdom.
Such facilities are desperately needed. Last year, a UN study offered the first comprehensive picture of the destruction Aids is wrecking on the nation of one million people. Up to one-third of the population, the study showed, are either HIV-positive, or have developed full-blown Aids.
A government unprepared to cope with a national health disaster of such magnitude adopted a defensive strategy in response to the report.
The Ministry of Health declared that "only" one-fifth of the population is HIV-positive. Even so, no new government programmes have been initiated to meet the emergency.
Among the deeply-traditional Swazi people, the subject of Aids is taboo. Sufferers do not acknowledge the cause of their illness, lest fearful family members refuse to attend their funerals. The health care and leadership vacuum has been filled by volunteers and social workers like Fr. McDonnell, who has been ministering to Swazis for three decades, mostly as an educator.
In March this year, the project called Hope House will receive its first tenants. Fifteen of 25 homes have been completed on the edge of Swaziland's commercial hub, Manzini, on land owned by the Catholic Archdiocese. Hope House is set on the rim of a beautiful green valley, and has the feel of a homestead.
Patients are not warehoused to die, but live what remains of their lives in dignity as part of a community. "Our residents will be men and women who are no longer allowed to stay in hospital," says Fr McDonnell. Swazi health facilities are unable to cope with the influx of Aids patients, who are discharged when death is near. "Swazis live in strong extended family units, but sometimes there is no one at a traditional homestead to tend to an Aids sufferer. A father may be dead, a mother sick, and children incapable of the responsibility."
A Hope House resident and relative, or a volunteer caregiver if not relative comes, share a house. A nurse from St Theresa's clinic located next door makes nightly rounds, administers medicine, and instructs caregivers. Because of its proximity to the town centre, Hope House offers a chance to educate the community. "We want the complex to be an all-purpose Aids centre. Not just the ill, but all people can come here for counseling on Aids prevention and how to take care of sick relatives," says McDonnell.
"Because Aids sufferers are either hidden from view or do not admit their illness, they are invisible and young people lack the necessary illustration of what Aids can do. Statistics mean nothing compared to examples."
Cultural resistance is inhibiting efforts to curtail the deadly epidemic. Swazis have one of the world's highest birth rates. But sex education is scarce in schools, and traditionalists and lawmakers ridicule condom usage.
Polygamy is legal, though rarely practiced because of the high cattle dowries required of the husband for new brides. But a polygamous mindset prompts young men to have multiple girlfriends, and for girls to acquiesce to their boyfriends.
Due to their legal status as minors, women cannot take out loans or register property in their own names, but must rely on male relatives and husbands. Women have less power to make decisions about reproduction. Then there are persistent beliefs of some Aids sufferers that having intercourse with a virgin will cleanse the body of the HIV virus, a practice that only spreads the disease to new victims.
Fr McDonnell feels the failure of various anti-Aids programmes in Swaziland is due to an emphasis on condom usage, in other words, making sexual activity "safe" rather than emphasising a message most Swazis would understand: Aids is a danger to fertility. A century ago, there were only 50 000 Swazis in the land, and since then reproduction has meant national survival.
But demographers note that life expectancy has already dropped from 67 years to 56 years due to Aids.
"The disease threatens to wipe out the nation," says social worker Thandi Masuku. "Already the youngest Swazis face a future without parents." The phenomenon of Aids orphans has inspired Orphanaid, a complementary project to Hope House that Fr McDonnell has launched this year with the Hospice at Home caregiver organisation. A Catholic orphanage in Manzini has been in operation for decades, but since the 1990s an alarming boom in children at the facility has developed.
What is worse are those orphaned children in rural lands who are neglected because no social worker knows of their existence. Orphanaid begins with the recruitment of one area representative, appointed by the local chief. He or she visits all homes and farms in the locality, and reports to the chief any child who is without competent adult supervision.
Also included in the group are children who have lost their parents, have been absorbed into an extended family, but are abused by relatives. Horrific Dickensian stories abound of orphaned children virtually enslaved by distant relatives, and subject to sexual and physical abuse. Swazi chiefs have been sensitised to their plight by government-sponsored education programmes.
Once a neglected child has been identified by the regional representative, an Orphanaid field officer will work with the chief to locate a caregiver. The chief will formally turn over the child to his new home. Assisting in the transfer are a host of volunteers assembled by Fr. McDonnell and Hospice at Home, working with the underfunded but indefatigable local branch of the Salvation Army.
Back at Hope House, most volunteers are teachers from the nearby Salesian Primary School. A swath of the surrounding town is owned by the Archdiocese, and includes separate primary and high schools for boys and girls, a health clinic, the Manzini City Cathedral, and a landmark stone church from the colonial days.
Fr. McDonnell has been ministering here since 1970. Gregarious and possessing the sonorous baritone voice of a radio announcer, his face ruddy from the Swazi summer sun, he exudes a sense of competency and good cheer as he inspires co-workers to push on against obstacles. He was ordained into the Salesian Order in 1963 after ten years of study in Italy and Ireland, specialising in education. For 18 years he set the standards in local education as headmaster for Salesian Boys High School. Since then, he has overseen the birth of the Manzini Industrial and Technical Centre, an Alternative School to offer education opportunities to street children, and the growing Bosco Youth Centre complex.
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"The work is done by volunteers," he says, "who are strongly motivated, mostly from a religious point of view." The modus operandi is to recognise a need for instance, the problem of homeless children
in town, who were virtually nonexistent a decade ago and then seek a solution. Who pays for all this?
Much funding comes from a business which exports overseas jams made from local fruits like buganu and mango. Two hundred families in the mountains are sustained from the income they earn weaving grass baskets to contain the jam jars.
Businesses are canvassed for donations, and Fr McDonnell has long-standing relationship with international donor organisations. Currently the Belgian government is building the John Bosco Youth Recreation centre near Hope House, located between the Bosco Skills Centre and the Bosco Study Centre. The latter facility permits teenage mothers to continue their education. In Swaziland, it is compulsory for girls who fall pregnant to leave school.
The eponymous John Bosco was known as Don Bosco when in 1860 he founded an order to administer to the Italian masses migrating from rural lands to the cities. In Swaziland today, an identical migration is bringing a host of social changes government and traditional structures are unable to meet. Hope House represents not just an immediate and compassionate answer to a health emergency, but along with Orphanaid is another imaginative response to crisis by volunteer workers.
Their strength and grace comes from their dedication. If Swaziland is to overcome its poverty and survive its Aids epidemic, such dedication will be its salvation.
AFRICANEWS News & Views on Africa from Africa Koinonia Media Centre, P.O. Box 8034, Nairobi, Kenya email: amani@iol.it
