|
|
 |
Lingering death in the canefields
Richard Morin for the Washington Post. Daily News, 1 April 2004. Republished courtesy of Independent Newspapers (Pty) Ltd
|
Sister Priscilla Dlamini clutched corner of her billowing black wimple as she pointed down the muddy dirt road that runs past the Holy Cross AIDS Hospice in Gingindlovu and disappears into a vast field of sugar cane swaying in the breeze. "The first house, there, the white one, you see it on the right?" she said, her thick finger tracing the path of the road to a thatched roof barely visible through the cane. "The father and the mother died of AIDS, so did the boy and two girls. That pink house over there, seven died. And there. All eight dead." Her hand swept back toward the horizon to cloud-shrouded mountains. "Everywhere between here and there are empty houses. In the mountains, it is even worse. And where there are people in the houses, there are graves beside them."
Death is never far away in the heart of what people here call the AIDS Belt, a region in rural KwaZulu-Natal that stretches from Richard's Bay on the Indian Ocean, to Mandeni 15 miles to the East, and South, 50 miles toward Durban. This is where the country faces the full fury of the AIDS pandemic and its social, economic and political devastation. It is also here that the government confronts an awful truth: there is too much to do and too little to do it with.
Deaths from AIDS will continue to rise for five years and perhaps for much longer. "For a whole generation, it is too late," Sister Dlamini said. The deaths are increasing every month. The dying is just beginning." One out of every nine South Africans - about five million people - are infected with the HI Virus, which causes AIDS. No country has more people who are HIV-positive. By 2010, AIDS is expected to cut life expectancy in half, from 68 years to 36 years.
A majority of South Africans fault the government for doing too little to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS, according to the Post/Kaiser/Harvard poll. The proportion who say AIDS is the country's top problem has nearly doubled since 2000, from 13% to 24%. The government has been slow to act in the face of the pandemic. President Thabo Mbeki startled the world health community in the late 1990s by publicly doubting that HIV causes AIDS, and then by championing the drug Virodene, a so-called AIDS cure that turned out to be little more than a toxic industrial solvent.
More recently, the government announced it will distribute anti-retroviral drugs free to those infected with HIV. The drugs do not cure the disease, but prolong life by preventing the onset of full-blown AIDS. But even if the HIV infection rate were to stabilise today, the death rate would continue to rise for at least another five to 10 years, said Professor Alan Whiteside, an economist at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban. It is the social, economic and political consequences of the oncoming wave of death and dying that may have its greatest impact on the future of democracy in South Africa.
"We simply don't yet know what the outcome will be," Whiteside said. "One possibility is that you could get an unsocialised, uneducated, unloved and probably criminal generation growing up, a breakdown in social order and public services ... at the extreme, a Blade Runner world." Or, he said, there is the possibility of "a national mobilisation on the most basic levels around dealing with the crisis".
Sister Priscilla's clinic, about 35 miles southwest of Richards Bay, serves a sparsely populated area roughly 10 miles square. Between Christmas and the end of January, the number of children orphaned by AIDS grew from 922 to 1025. At the same time, the number of child-headed households visited by her staff increased from 372 to 420. A recent government study found that 37% of all pregnant women in KZN were HIV-positive, or about 10 percentage points higher than in all of South Africa. Based on incomplete data collected by area hospitals, Sister Priscilla says the infection rate is even higher here in the AIDS Belt.
In the six years she has worked at the Holy Cross Clinic - the last two as the founding director of the Catholic mission's 40-bed AIDS hospice - Sister Priscilla has come to know the sounds of AIDS. From one ward room comes a shrill, whooping cry, punctuated by a dry, congested cough. Nomandla Dube, 7, is thirsty. Her hollow eyes are round with fear and overflow with tears. "I want to go home," she cries out in Zulu. "Why do you keep me here? Why? Why?" Sister Priscilla calls for an aide to bring water. She leans over and whispers a few words of comfort, but she does not tell her the truth. The girl will not go home before she dies. And maybe not even then. "The mother is dead, the father is dead," Sister Priscilla said. "There is no home."
She opened the hospice because so many dying AIDS victims were being left in the sugar-cane fields by the families for the clinic workers to find. "At that time, people would come home from Durban and the other cities to die," Sister Priscilla said. "But relatives were not accepting them. They chased them away, or dumped them on the edge of the sugar-cane plantations and we were going around picking them up and bringing them here."
She ushers a visitor into a brightly lit room nearly filled with twin beds. "This ward was to be used for couples," she said. "Sometimes you get couples dying at the same time." But these beds are rarely filled. "Most of the time the couples don't want to be together. They want to be separated. They blame each other if they are both positive."
The government has not said when the free drugs will arrive in places like Emoyeni. But even if they came tomorrow, rural areas lack the infrastructure and trained staff to dispense and properly monitor the use of these sophisticated medications, she says. "There are not enough workers, there are not enough nurses," says Sister Priscilla, 55, a nurse who sits on the boards of local, national and international AIDS organisations. "It is a good first step, but it came too late, and even though it is late, the (national) government is not ready for it. The government finally opened its eyes and boom, it was too late."
Politics, too, has conspired to make the AIDS Belt perhaps the most neglected front in the government's belated response to the pandemic. Two years ago, the Global Fund awarded $75 million to KwaZulu-Natal to fight AIDS. But the federal government held up the grant until last summer because the province had approached the Global Fund directly. Minister of Health Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang argued that the money should have been given to the national government and disbursed to all nine provinces.
For the full story in MSWord, click on the hyperlink in the right-hand column |
| Was this article helpful to you? |
 ?100%???? ?0%
|
|
Back
|
|
|
|
