Making a difference on HIV/AIDS frontline

Thembi Kubheka has been a volunteer HIV and AIDS counsellor for four years. She is only 24 years old but has the presence and maturity of someone much older. She speaks with a quiet, gentle voice, but when she talks about her work she exudes confidence and passion. Thembi is on the frontline of South Africa’s HIV/AIDS pandemic.

She first heard about AIDS through the local grapevine. People in her Alexandria township community were talking about this “strange disease called HIV” that was making people lose weight, sicken and die.

“I felt angry because people around me were dying and they were dying alone.
People were scared of them, they didn’t want to touch them or even talk to them,” she told IRIN.

Thembi wasn’t afraid of AIDS, and she wasn’t afraid to talk to someone living with AIDS. She wanted to help and make life better for them. She wanted to make a difference to their lives. She decided to visit one of her neighbours who was ill. This woman was living alone, with no support from her family or friends. She was bed-ridden and had to use a bucket as her toilet.

“It was so touching seeing someone in such a sad situation. I knew that God must have sent me there to help her,” Thembi said.

This was Thembi’s introduction to the reality of AIDS. She became a regular visitor to the woman. She would talk to her, bathe her and take her to the hospital.

But what really mattered to this woman was that Thembi was someone who wasn’t afraid to touch her, someone who treated her with dignity and consideration. Thembi made a difference to her life. When she talks about the woman and how her eventual death affected her, her voice becomes even softer and you can see the lingering sadness in her eyes.

“I wasn’t with her when she died. But I didn’t expect her to leave me since she was much stronger,” she said. “Because of her I found the strength to go on and work with other people with AIDS who needed my help.”

Thembi trained to become a volunteer with a non-governmental organisation, Friends For Life that provides counselling, home-based, and palliative care to People Living with AIDS (PWA’s).

“I bathed terminally ill people, cleaned their mouths if they had oral thrush. Even if they had sores on their private parts, I tended to them. This made me realise how much I had changed because when I was younger I couldn’t even go into a hospital to visit someone who was sick,” she explained.

Thembi’s family has always been supportive of her work. They know how much it means to her and they are a constant source of encouragement. She has many friends who are also counsellors, her best friend counsels abused women.

With a total of 4.2 million infected people, South Africa has the largest number of PWAs in the world, as well as one of the fastest growing epidemics.

According to UNAIDS figures, already one in four South African women between ages 20 and 29 are infected with the virus.

Until mid-June the HIV clinic at Johannesburg Hospital where Thembi counsels operated once a week for four hours with just two full-time doctors.
In those four hours the clinic would treat an average of 70 patients. Now the clinic has three full-day sessions a week with a pool of six doctors. The doctors are in attendance for consultations on Tuesdays, and patients are seen for follow-up treatment and counselling by the nurses, social worker and counsellors on Mondays and Wednesdays.

Apart from her, there is one other volunteer counsellor. The counsellors meet regularly to “de-brief” and discuss their counselling sessions.
Most of the patients have emotional, social and economic issues that they need help with. Thembi keeps a journal to help her cope with the stress of the work. She records details of the issues that she deals with, and how she responds to those issues. At the end of each week she reads that weeks entries to check if she has successfully managed to overcome her own emotional responses.

She can’t afford to let her own emotions stand in the way of her work.

“But the work does affect me,” she told IRIN. “Sometimes when I’m at home, something will happen that takes me back to a particular patient or counselling session. When that happens I talk, I don’t keep the feelings inside. I talk to whoever I’m with, and tell them how I’m feeling. That way I can get over the feelings.”

Thembi says she used to be an out-going person who enjoyed going to parties and socialising. But since she started doing HIV counselling she has changed. She doesn’t enjoy going out anymore. She appreciates spending quality time with her family and friends, and finds pleasure and satisfaction in staying home. She wasn’t even aware of the change taking place, but she feels that it’s a positive one.

She accepts that currently there is no cure for AIDS, but as a counsellor, she believes she can make a difference to the lives of the patients that she sees.

“We can give them the support and the love and care that they need because these people have often experienced rejection. You can see it in the way that they sit in the clinic. They don’t talk to each other, they just sit and wait to be seen. Most of them can’t discuss their HIV status with their families and friends so when they come into the counselling room this is their only opportunity to talk to someone. The doctors and nurses give them their physical medicine and we, the counsellors give them the emotional medicine.”

Thembi has one more dream, a dream she has had since she was a child. Thembi wants to train to be a social worker, but she doesn’t have the means to pay for the training.

“I want to be in a situation where I can work and make sure that PWA’s can live without being discriminated against. I can’t change the world but I can change the people,” she said.

For information from the UN Special Session on HIV/AIDS and a selection of IRIN features on how Africa is fighting the pandemic, please see:
http://www.reliefweb.int/IRIN/webspecials/hiv_aids/index.phtml