Siyakhula OVC Christmas Party

Today was Siyakhula's last day of operation before Christmas. It was also the day of their OVC Christmas Party. It was such a wonderful event, filled with speakers and dancing and the giving away of duvet sets to 20 of their children.Representatives from Social Development and Small Projects Foundation spoke, along with the OVC Coordinators for both Philisa and Mdumbi HBCs and myself.
It was very good for Philisa and Mdumbi to be there. Events like these will soon be part of their programs and it is a very good learning experience for them to be able to see how these events are put on and participate in them.
Siyakhula has estimated that there are about 557 Orphans and Vulnerable Children, in their area who have been receiving services from Siyakhula since 2008. These services include blankets, winter clothes, uniforms, and food parcels, among other thing. They also have 50 foster parents participating in the support group they set up specifically for foster parents in their ward.
Siyakhula and especially Lindelwa received much deserved praises for the hard work they have been doing in their community. Here Lindelwa is dancing with a choir from one of the local schools.







Ntomfikile the OVC Coordinator for Mdumbi and Nontandazo, the Project Leader of Philisa speaking about their work and the importance of supporting OVCs.






This event was the last for Home Based Care for this year as all of the offices are now closed for Christmas. In January Lindelwa will begin working full time with Transcape as the HBC Coordinator and we will begin intensively training all of the HBCs together.

Happy Holidays!

World AIDS Day

Thursday was World AIDS Day in Libode, an event put on by a few different organizations in this area along with some government representatives. Siyahkula HBC was one of the organizations who helped to plan the day and so I went with them to the event.
The event was very successful. There was a ceremony with speakers from the different representatives as well as a lot of traditional dancing. There were also opportunities for VCT in seperate tents outside. Siyakhula helped to arrange the catering for the day and the people who attended were able to have a cooked meal. Even though the day was very rainy and miserable, there was a huge number of people in attendance and all of them seemed to have a very good time!
The day was concluded with a candle light service for those were living with or had passed away from AIDS. People living with HIV were asked to come to the front and together they sang and prayed. While I couldn't understand exactly what was being said, the impact of the words could definately be felt and it was an amazing thing to be part of.

Planning

Lately my work with the homebased care groups has been alot more office based than work with the groups themselves. I have been working closely with Lindelwa, the project leader of Siyakhula and soon to be Home Based Care Coordinator for TransCape. Together we have been making a plan for how we would like to add quality to the care provided by the groups throughout the next 2 years and more specifically for me over the next 6 months.
One of our biggest goals for the groups for over the next coming months is that they will all be using a system of reporting with which we will be able to gather information about each client and the type of care they are receiving from the carers. We would like this information to be both outcome based, showing what services are being provided and who exactly is receiving those services, and also personal enough to be able to easily monitor that each individual patient is receiving the proper care from their carer.
We also plan to provide more trainings for the carers, most importantly getting all of the carers certified for home based caring. Some of this training has already begun, with 5 members of Siyakhula and one member each from Philisa and Mdumbi being trained along side the prevention teams in Voluntary Counselling and Testing.
The Home Based Care groups are all getting ready to wrap up their years and take a break for christmas which means that a lot of work must be done in the next 2 weeks in terms of planning for the start of next year.

Door to Door with Mdumbi HBC

I was given the opportunity to spend the day going door to door with the caregivers of Mdumbi Home Based Care this past week. What an eye opening experience that was! It was amazing and eye openning for me to be able to see into the lives of the people of the community in which we are working.

From this experience I was able to see first hand the work that the caregivers are doing everyday. This gives me a better idea of how to add quality to their program. One thing I noticed about the Mdumbi group is that they seem to be working more as social workers, than healthcare workers. Many of the homes that we visited were those of orhpans or vulnerable children (OVCs) and we talked to the guardians about how to get foster care grants and how best to care for the children. While we did see some patients with medical problems, such as TB or chronic pain, I saw more counselling being done than hands on patient care.

The ability to counsel clients and direct them to the appropriate services are definate strengths, however these strengths need to be built upon with other forms of care, such as bathing patients and treating minor medical issues as there is a high need of these forms of care in their community.

A couple of images from the day:

Nosiseko has been counselling this tata in how to care for his 2 orphaned grandchildren who have come to live with him. She is helping him to get a Foster Care grant and teaching him important things about caring for children.

This Mama lives alone and had no one to care for her when she was released from the hospital after being treated for TB so Ntombifikile visits her every day and cooks and cleans for her and gives her a bath.

Introduction

As part of Transcape's HIV/AIDS program we are currently supporting 3 home based care groups. Home based care is an important part of the HIV program, giving support to those people in the community who are bedridden or elderly. The caregivers go door to door to see patients and assist them with their basic needs, going to the clinic or hospital and accessing governments services.

Siyakhula Home Community Based Care was the first group to be established. Lindelwa Portia has worked as their project leader since the beginning, and with her help the group has been able to become an independant Non Profit Organization and receive funding from the Department of Social Development.

Mdumbi HBC and Philisa HBC are our newer groups, both groups came together in 2008. Lindelwa has also helped these groups to start up and given them some training in homebased caring. They are still both in the development stages however, with alot of organizational work still to be done. Philisa has completed an NPO application and has submitted a funding proposal to Social Development and is now just waiting to hear back for their answer. Mdumbi is still working on preparing their constitution and business plan to submit to Social Development with their application and proposal.

In October participatory workshops were held with all three groups to discuss the work they are doing in their communities and their goals and needs for the future. These workshops were all very successful and the information gathered from them will be transfered into the HIV strategy that is being put in place by Transcape.

Some of the needs raised by the groups:

-Home based Care Kits, with the supplies needed to treat their patients when they do home visits. Supplies such as gloves, masks, disposable nappies, pain killers, etc.

- Philisa and Mdumbi need offices. Philisa has now been given a plot of land from the ward counsilor and Mdumbi is still in discussions with thier ward about their plot.

-Gardens. All three groups would like to have gardens where they could grow vegetables to give to their patients who have no food and sell to make money for other projects they would like to begin.

Also in October, all three groups were given 50 laying hens. The eggs were meant to be given to the OVCs and then sold as a source of income for the group. The groups have had some trouble with getting the chickens to start laying eggs, however as the chickens settle down into their new homes we should begin to see more eggs than we know what to do with.

These groups are all extremely energetic and passionate about the work that they are doing in their communities. I am excited to see how these groups develop in the next few months as