Family support with the help of CAFI is making the difference for this 10 year old girl

This is a story of a young girl named Victor, who didn’t get her required dose of parental love because of HIV/AIDS.  Victor is 10 years old and lives with her aunt because she lost both parents to HIV/ AIDS when she was only two.  After first being taken to live with her grandmother, who was unable to care for Victor, her Aunt Prossy intervened and became the only mother Victor has ever really known.

Victor was a sickly girl, and her aunt and uncle did all they could to see that every time she fell ill, she promptly received treatment. As time went on, Victor developed a very bad rash that made her uncle question the health status of his niece. To be sure they were treating the right disease, he suggested Victor be taken for an HIV test at the Children’s AIDS Fund Family Hope Centre in Uganda, a place he heard about but had never visited. Although it was a long distance to travel, they made the trip and Victor was tested.   That rash was in fact a symptom of HIV/AIDS and the diagnosis and treatment that CAFI provided surely saved her life.

Today Aunt Prossy is a happy woman. She says that the ARV medication that Victor receives from the clinic has greatly improved her health and life. She also says because the clinic offers medical care for its patients, when Victor becomes sick, she does not have to worry where she will go for treatment. Her major challenge in caring for Victor is providing a good diet. HIV positive people are required to eat well because it helps keep their bodies strong and also helps the medicine work efficiently. She has been able to find a small job which enables her to look after herself and young Victor.

To Aunt Prossy, Victor and CAFI are an inspiration that has
shown her that “there is always hope.”

Aunt Prossy is thankful for the support of her family and for the CAFI Family Hope Centre, which helps Victor free of charge. Her other family members have also been supportive in many ways. “They understood what killed Victor’s parents so this has helped me clearly explain to her what she is suffering from and why she is taking the drugs” she says.  “Ignorance was the  main factor that made my sister-in-law and brother die of  HIV/AIDS, everyone should know their status so as to be sure of the illness they are treating and suffering from.”

Aunt Prossy and her family, along with CAFI are making surethat Victor gets her “doses of love.”

 A TRUE STORY ABOUT YOUNG MOTHERS STRUGGLING TO SURVIVE
 
More than 20 years ago, in Uganda, a young woman in her twenties laid on her deathbed.   Abandoned by her husband, after having infected her with HIV, she was left alone to care for her three young children.   Because of her deteriorating health, she lost her job.   Her friends and family all left her for dead. When her youngest child was just a toddler, she learned he also had HIV.

One day some strangers came to her door and offered to help.   No one had been kind to her since she had gotten sick so she was very suspicious of their motives.   But the strangers kept coming back, week after week, and she slowly began to trust them.    Eventually she accepted medicine, first for her baby, then for herself.   As she and her baby became stronger and healthier, she realized that she and her baby did not have to die. She began to hope that she might  live to care for her children.

The strangers introduced her to a woman who taught her how to make paper bead necklaces.   As she carefully made each individual bead by hand, she planned how she would sell the beads to buy food and clothes for her children.  And step, by hopeful step, that’s what she did.   Along the way she met other young mothers who were in the same situation and taught them the skill of making paper beads.   Soon there were hundreds of children who had medicine to take, food to eat, and clothes to wear from the sales of their mothers’ paper bead necklaces.  All because some strangers took time to stop and offer help.

This is the story of hundreds, if not thousands, of Ugandan women. 

To include some of these beads in your gift giving please contact us.

The impact of HIV/AIDS continues in lives of children and those who care for them in Uganda.  In one slum in the heart of Kampala, a grandmother struggled to care for two sets of twins who had been abandoned because their parents died of HIV/AIDS. With no income she struggled to keep them alive by the side of the road near a local swamp with the only home she could provide a cardboard box not much larger than a telephone booth. As she struggled to clothe and feed the children, her only resource was what she could collect from nearby fruit trees and the occasional help of others. Clearly the five would not long survive living in such conditions.

Upon visiting the site, Children’s AIDS Fund International, with its local partners, provided rent for a home in a safer neighborhood where the grandmother and double twins could live, as well as seed money for a small business selling fresh food (bananas and potatoes) and charcoal, which will over time be able to support the family. Today, now six months later, the twins are thriving and the grandmother’s business is growing. With mentorship she is setting goals and looks forward to the day when her income will be enough to pay for the rent, food, clothing, and all the other children’s needs.

For the first time in the HIV/AIDS epidemic we are on the verge of eliminating mother-to-child transmission of the virus. In fact, CAFI is participating in the joint UNAIDS/UNICEF/PEPFAR “Countdown to Zero” campaign that has laid out a plan to eliminate new HIV infections among children by 2015 and keep their mothers alive.

Early in the pandemic a lot was not well understood–including transmission of HIV from mother to child. Programs focused nearly exclusively on research and support for infected children. In 1988, CAFI began a program to benefit both infected and affected children with the goal of addressing the full spectrum of related suffering. Even without antiretroviral (ARVs) medication available at the time, two thirds of children born to HIV positive mothers were not themselves infected, although all carried their mother’s antibodies at birth.

The 1991 landmark study—Protocol 076—revealing that the AIDS medication zidovudine (AZT) administered prenatally or at birth could essentially eliminate mother-to-child transmission. CAFI has joined with physicians, advocates and policy makers to lead the campaign for HIV diagnosis of pregnant women and newborns. Despite many objections to testing, New York state passed its historic “Baby AIDS” legislation in 1997 that required HIV testing of all newborns and identified over 98 percent of all HIV-exposed births ensuring that both mother and child received early diagnosis and care. In the years following, and as a result of CAFI’s leadership, HIV diagnosis of pregnant women became today’s global standard of care.

Since 2003, support for more than 16 million affected orphaned and vulnerable children has become a vital target of all effective programs. Focusing on life and livelihood skills, education, nutrition, security and prevention, CAFI programs have served more than 1 million infected and affected children in the US and sub-Saharan Africa over 25 years.

Once we eliminate mother-to-child transmission, the key will be to prevent infection for these precious children through any other means to ensure their healthy futures. The combination of these essential and critical steps, if implemented effectively, will bring us closer and closer to the dream of an AIDS-free generation becoming reality.