HOPE in Zambia

My story is about Zambia, Hope Humana, and how the economical crisis might change development work.

Hello reader,

My story is about Zambia, Hope Humana, and how the economical crisis might change development work.  

I worked in a program named Hope Humana for 6 beautiful months.

Hope is a program with a focus on HIV in the community. We support people living with HIV and help them physically and mentally become stronger by giving them positive living courses, let them support each other by helping them form support groups, promote eating healthy by growing gardens etc.

We also do a lot about prevention, we teach in schools, we organise meetings in churches and help sex workers to work safe or to change business. Next to that some Hope offices have a health facility to test for HIV, or work together with another organization that does HIV tests.

According to the CIA world fact book, 1,1 million people of the 11,8 million people are living at this moment with HIV-AIDS, 15 % of the adult population is infected with the virus!

This is a big problem, people are too sick and die too young to be of use for the economy of Zambia. The copper prices had dropped and the crops were unsuccessful last year.

The (young) adults are the ones suffering the most from the fatal virus, leaving their children in the hands of the grandparents who have difficulties getting them dressed, keeping them nourished and send to school.

At this moment the life expectancy at birth is 38,5 years old.

These are some troublesome numbers that might mean nothing to you, it's hard to imagine this amount of people suffering from the deadly virus. To be fair, it's even difficult to imagine when you are in Zambia. The Zambian people are very cheerful and don't like to complain, and they certainly won't tell you their HIV positive status.

Even now, after all the propaganda on television, newsletters, schools and market places, the people who are open about their disease are being stigmatized and can face social exclusion.

Most of the development organizations get money from sponsorships. In good times people give more to charity, but in these times of crisis, it's more common to think first of one selves, than of others. Unfortunately this has a big impact in development work, meaning the money that was available before is now no more. The projects have to close, or cannot function as needed.

For me that meant I had to do my own fundraising in order to make my project work. In short, the  program came down to test the children of all members of the 20 support groups and create a course for the support group members about Children and HIV. Children are mostly not tested for HIV, so some will become very sick and suffer unnecessary and might die because they get diagnosed HIV positive too late.

Recently Zambia started Prevention of Mother To Child Transmission (PMTCT). This is a big step forward, the children will be tested when born and so help will be given on time. But the status of the older children will still be unknown, it's a big step to take the children and go to the clinic to get tested, they might turn out positive!

From the information gotten while testing it turned out that we didn't discover new cases of HIV  within a group of children under 5 years of age, this seems to indicate that PMTCT is working.

14% of the 277 children tested at that moment were HIV positive, not counting the ones who were diagnosed already.

To sum it all up: The economical crisis has a major effect on development work. In the case of Zambia it could mean death and unnecessary suffering to innocent people. So let’s all decide we would not let that happen, and do what is in our power to prevent this  from happening. It doesn't have to mean giving money, but be active, creative, understanding and implementing while being a DI in Africa.

It will give you a good feeling in return.

Kind regards,

Elles