Activity Report 2010 - Sovereign Military Order of Malta in the United ...

Kenya
HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis: Africa
struggles with challenges that
won’t go away
TOTAL AREA:
582,650 sq km
POPULATION:
39,002,772
GDP
PER CAPITA:
$1,600
LIFE EXPECTANCY
AT BIRTH:
57.86 years
In parts of Africa people are
still desperately fighting
against diseases which seem
only a faraway memory to
the developed world.
Africans, as well as being
blighted by HIV/AIDS, are
still dying of tuberculosis and
the plague, even though
these diseases were
theoretically wiped out
almost a century ago. Our
correspondent went to Kenya
and Congo to see for herself.
T
he Riruta health centre,
run by the Order of Malta’s
relief service in the slums
of Nairobi well deserves
the Kenyan National Award
for the best managed
tuberculosis facility (a title it has won for
two consecutive years). However,
the work in this centre which cares for
600,000 people and which also treats
HIV/AIDS patients, goes far beyond
technical excellence. It is the people
who work there who make the difference
- people like Jane, the staff nurse,
with her group of volunteer community
workers, Margaret, Mary, Lucy and
young Moses, who actually live in the
slums and are each responsible for the
area where they live. The secret of their
success? Endless hours of health
education and counselling to enable
their patients to take responsibility for
themselves, to ensure that they realise
the necessity of taking their medications
regularly, to encourage the neighbourhood
to look out for each other, banish
the fear that AIDS and TB engender and
make the centre a patient-friendly place
to go. Riruta is indeed that; everything
is clean and tidy, patients’ charts are
safely locked away, nobody is wearing a
face mask or gloves. Even young Juliet,
who has been on TB therapy for three
weeks and looks very frail but beautiful,
like a Masai statuette, is beginning to
feel reassured. At last she has begun to
reply to Jane’s requests and accepts to
be weighed! Our reward: a shy smile as
we applaud her for a 2 kg. weight gain.
Out of the inferno
After having visited the health ‘paradise’
which is Riruta, we are plunged into
Dante’s inferno as we arrive at the
Mukuro Nyayo slum, accompanied by
Margaret and the Malteser International
team. Coordinator for Kenya,
Paul Ochieng is a university graduate.
He tells me he was born and grew up
in a slum and that when his own five
children were old enough he took them
to see it, so that they would understand
the importance of studying and of hard
work to make better lives for themselves.
The slum is difficult to describe,
even when seen on a sunny day under a
perfect blue sky. It is a maze of rickety,
tiny huts made out of corrugated metal,
wood, cardboard, with ‘streets’ of
pressed earth, deeply scored by rivulets
of some unidentifiable liquid (possibly
water). And then we duck into a hut and
meet Scholastica, who is only 33, but
looks like an emaciated 80 year old.
Her head is covered with sparse wisps
of hair, the skin is drawn so tight over
her face that it looks like a skull and she
is covered with AIDS sores. She quietly
tells me that she has been on TB
therapy for three months and hopes that
she will soon be well enough to start
AIDS treatment. She was referred to the
Riruta centre by a district hospital and
could not at first believe that she would
not have to pay for the medications and
that the community workers would
make sure that she received her supply
at home when she was too weak to go to
the centre. Her husband works occasionally
as a driver and two of her
children live with her brother in the
country. Her oldest child, a 14 year old
boy (and probably the only member of
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SOVEREIGN MILITARY HOSPITALLER ORDER OF ST. JOHN OF JERUSALEM OF RHODES AND OF MALTA