By Jeckonia Otieno
They may not be acclaimed, yet the work they do is enormously important to their community.
Each of these three women in their individual capacity has a different scope to the work they do among families living with HIV and Aids in Butere, Kakamega County.
Gay Aseyo, Alice Auma and Mary Otembo have been in the forefront in confronting the pandemic.
They are a representative of the many women who voluntarily do community service for the love of it.
Aseyo, who is from Mutoma sub location, a kilometre from Butere township, has worked with people living with HIV and Aids for the past five years. She says it has not been easy, but she has managed to sustain the service.
traumatised children
She notes that children whose parents are affected are in most cases traumatised hence they need a lot of support from the community in order to lead normal lives.
“It involves talking to them and assuring them that life does not end with their parents’ predicament,” she says.
She adds: “We talk to them and let them know that despite their parents living with the condition, life has to continue as usual. We also teach them that they can do something positive with their lives despite their parents’ condition.”
To achieve this objective, she says, they have to go to schools and talk to the teachers about what is happening at the pupils home so that they are understood and assured that they can still achieve their goals in life.
Aseyo says they always meet the children within the home setting because removing them from the home environment makes the care superficial and might leave them wondering what the care giver is up to.
“The child might think that you have a low opinion on their home and this might lead to a breakdown of communication between the child and the caregiver, which in the long run jeopardises the relationship,” she notes.
Aseyo says in most cases the children are allowed in sessions when their parents are being counselled on how to live healthy lives because this makes them know what to do in case the parents do not want to, for instance, take medication or eat a healthy diet.
Aseyo says she is currently caring for more than ten families, adding she targets to reach more in the area.
Her colleague Auma from Bukolwe village has openly declared that she is living positively with the virus. She tested positive in 2001 after her husband passed on leaving her with two children. She is in another group of caregivers — those whose spouses have died of the virus leaving them with children to take care of.
“When I tested positive,” she says, “I joined a support group and opted to live a normal life for my children’s sake. They are now in primary school and my greatest wish is for them to have a bright future.”
Auma is thankful that after coming out openly, her relatives accepted her and decided to support her. This has given her the much needed strength.
For Otembo, taking care of six children whose mother died since 1985 has been no mean feat. In total she had nine children to bring up because she had three of her own.
She recalls: “When their mother passed on, their dad had no job, so I had to look after them.”
She says the youngest was only six months and still suckling when she took them in. Otembo says to her, all of them were and still are her children.
challenging cause
The children are now grown-ups who can chart their own paths in life.
These caregivers have to contend with many challenges in the course of duty from hostile relatives, to denial by those they care for.
Aseyo says that there are those who live with HIV and Aids but have never accepted it. They blame it on witchcraft and animosity from relatives. She notes that in many cases they have to seek the Provincial Administration to force these people to go for medical care because many of them resort to traditional medicine men whose only interest is money.
With rampant poverty, when these patients are visited by the caregivers, they expect to be given food and money, which the voluntary caregivers do no always have.
“This makes them switch off and refuse to listen to what you are telling them because they feel you owe them something,” Aseyo notes.
Otembo notes: “It is a delicate matter because punishing such children even when they are wrong is misconstrued as mistreating them because their parents are dead.”
She is happy that she brought them up to be responsible citizens and most of them are married after she saw them through Form Four.
For Auma, the greatest problem is providing for her children when she is ailing. Sometimes she says gets severely sick that she cannot work yet she is the sole breadwinner.
Where elders care for orphaned children
It is common to find grandmothers taking care of children whose parents have succumbed to HIV and Aids.
In western Kenya, the elderly are left with as many as seven orphans to care for. With meagre resources and fading energy, these elderly people find it hard to bring up these children properly.
Pauline Makwaka, the executive director of Senior Women Citizens for Change (SWCC), an organisation that educates the elderly women on numerous crosscutting issues, notes that it is common in Kenya to have old guardians.
“These old people have to live with these children and at times it is more difficult when they have to look after the children’s sick parents too because this adds more strain,” Makwaka observes.
She also decries the problem of the cash transfer for the elderly in the villages noting that it is riddled with a lot of irregularities due the many middlemen involved. This prevents the deserving women from getting what is rightfully budgeted for by the Government.
Norah Aliaro, a programme officer with SWCC, says that something has to be done to ensure financial security for the elderly in society.
During a recent workshop on caregivers in Kakamega and Butere, the two elderly women lamented the damage that HIV and Aids as well as poverty has brought in western Kenya.
Speaking at the workshop, most elders lamented the dubiousness surrounding the monthly cash transfer to the elderly. They want proper mechanisms to be put in place to ensure accountability.