Trump's slash and burn to foreign aid has hit HIV programmes hard. Here's what Hlokomela Clinic has been doing to prepare for such cuts -- and what it has learned about surviving over the past 20 years.

Trump's slash and burn to foreign aid has hit HIV programmes hard. Here's what Hlokomela Clinic has been doing to prepare for such cuts -- and what it has learned about surviving over the past 20 years.

When Sindy Nkuna woke up to an email saying that the United States had decided to temporarily freeze all foreign aid in January, it was scary.

"I felt shattered," she says. "For days I had racing heartbeats thinking what's going to happen to me and to my kids. It was unbelievable. I have two boys."

Nkuna had been placed at the Hlokomela Clinic, 200km away from Polokwane, keeping track of HIV information in the fruit and game farming community of the Mopani district, Limpopo.

A data capturer, she tracked new cases of HIV, how many people had been tested and how many were on treatment. The funding for her job -- and six HIV testing counsellors, a site coordinator and part of their financial manager's salary -- came through a grant from the Anova Health Institute, the HIV organisation that received the most President's Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar) funding in South Africa.

Pepfar is the...