Living with a deadly disease

Openness is important if you want to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS

By Jes Mortensen and Mie Kirstine Rasmussen

10. March 2006

Just outside Dar es Salaam City, down a dusty road, thirty people are gathered in a banda between some mango trees. They have been sitting in this circle for several hours talking about the vitamins in the leaves and fruits that some of them are holding. There is one reason why everyone here needs the vitamins from the mlonge tree leaves. They are all infected with HIV.

We are with a counselling group from the Wamata, Dar es Salaam branch. Wamata is the oldest HIV/AIDS organisation in Tanzania and provides medicine and counselling to HIV patients. “We help them to live with HIV and AIDS and to live in hope. We teach them how to use their medicine correctly and how to prepare food in the best possible way and how to get good nutrition,” says a counsellor at Wamata, Saleh Kadope.

This Wamata VCT Centre has more than 7,000 patients attached. Saleh Kadope thinks that the popularity is caused by the fact that the patients get the opportunity to exchange their experiences with others. “They are all at different levels of the disease and can help each other to a better life,” he says.

One of the main focuses in the counselling is to make the patients tell their relatives about the disease. One of the counselling groups at the centre is for relatives. “It is important that they tell their relatives about the disease. It gives them the opportunity to become good care providers when they get weak,” Saleh Kadope says.

Telling their relatives is the first way to more openness about HIV and AIDS. It removes some of the stigmatization that the patients experience. “After the meetings here they become more open about their disease. Then they can start telling others about HIV. Openness is important if you want to stop the spreading of the virus. By learning more about the virus the patients can help stop the spreading of HIV and AIDS,” Saleh Kadope says. The counselling is through for this time. But next month the group will meet again to exchange experiences.