Women of Mukakhe Village Join the Fray

Mukakhe is one of the villages in Kalinde area in Migowi, Phalombe where the ADRA Malawi’s Let Fight AIDS in Malawi (LEFAM) Project is doing its activities in helping to fight the HIV/AIDS pandemic, food security, home based care of the chronically ill etc.

To achieve its goals the project formed groups of women to discuss issues that are thorny in their communities and find solutions to these problems. Realizing that they are not part of the women’s group that was formed, other women in this village, led by Alefa Maiwala and Edna Magodi, were impressed with the good work that the Organization is doing in the village and felt they could lend a hand. They decided to mobilize other women and form their own group to help in what the ADRA women were doing. They also decided to go further by getting involved in message dissemination through dances and drama and strengthening food security and nutrition by setting up a group vegetable garden and encouraging the setting up of kitchen gardens in the village.

The group has gone further to lobby for the provision of safe water sources within the village, which has no borehole or water tap despite its size and population through knowledge attained from ADRA activities. These women also harbor the ambition of improving the members’ economic status through saving and lending.

Realizing the power of drama, yet not having any experience in drama, the group approached ADRA Community Worker in the area for some coaching. Since this was a separate group from ADRA’s group they had limited resources. They needed some seeds for the garden to supplement what they had contributed and bought. They also needed some equipment like drums for the dances. To make sure that their efforts are not in vain the group has been granted permission to use whatever equipment that is available within the ADRA groups.

The group was formed in April this year and has so far 25 members. As of now, they have set up the vegetable garden and planted using the seedlings they bought and what was donated by the Community Worker. ADRA regularly visits the group to encourage and build their capacity, through demonstrations, on how to make sunken beds, plant seedlings and mulch to preserve moisture and reduce watering frequency.

What is interesting with the group is that the village Chief tries to attend the group’s meetings and supports them in their activities. This makes ADRA feel that with some support, this group will be an important partner in the fight against the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Author: Stanley Mpasa - District Coordinator

TOT strategy breaks walls of stigma

No one could imagine that the deep rooted and high walls of stigma can easily fall in Kabwazi village community North of Ntcheu.

History tells that for a long time people had been denying the reality of HIV/AIDS since the epidemic was known in the late 1980s. In the recent past, several non-governmental organizations have implemented projects to boost HIV/AIDS awareness in this community but behaviour change remained a challenge. HIV/AIDS continued to be viewed as a family disease other than community one, thereby marginalizing those associated with it.
Going for voluntarily counseling and testing (VCT) was made secret and the HIV status of a person could be hidden. Even if some body had died of apparent symptoms of AIDS, public information emphasized that the deceased was a victim of witchcraft or died of a mysterious illness leaving people to conclude intrinsically that it was AIDS. But with the coming of the TOT approach to the HIV/AIDS problem in the community where counseling services have been tailored with preservation of rights of vulnerable groups especially those living with HIV/AIDS, the face of the pandemic has changed.
According to Moses Kapolo, one of the TOTs working in Kabwazi community a series of open forums on HIV/AIDS issues facilitated by the trainers have reduced levels of confidentiality as many people can now openly disclose their HIV/AIDS status. He says that the number of people who disclose their HIV status has increased and he use some of them as role models to reach out to other people.

The village head Kabwazi has given out one of his houses as a village counseling centre. Moses Kapolo is happy that he can now attend to more people per day for counseling. He says that those counseled include couples. According to Moses, his village would be safe if the trend continues because every person in the village would be aware of his or her status.

He also hinted that the Counselors have embarked on exchange visits in order to reach out to many people. In a dramatic turn of events, HIV/AIDS in Kabwazi village is viewed as community problem and many people including the village head himself admit that the pandemic need collective solutions to defeat

Author: Judith Chirwa - TOT site coordinator

Handover of bicycle ambulance

On Friday the 15^th of May ADRA Malawi handed over a new bicycle ambulance to Ndunde site in Chiradzulu. The ambulance was donated by private donors from Denmark through ADRA Malawi’s partner organisation ADRA Denmark.  

Present at the handover were representatives from ADRA Denmark communication officers Lise Jensen and Mette Hansen, the village chiefs, the ADRA community facilitator and health assistants. After a small formal function the bicycle ambulance was taken in use and tried by the health assistants. The ADRA community facilitator said, “We are very grateful for this precious gift. It will help many people in our community. Zikomo Kwambiri!”

The bicycle ambulance will be attached to Ndunde Health Clinic. The clinic serves 17000 people from the surrounding 49 villages. 250 people are treated at the clinic each day.

The bicycle ambulance will take patients from the villages to the health clinic. The advantages of having a bicycle ambulance at the local health clinics are numerous. As Stanley Mpasa District Coordinator from Mulanje district explains:

“There are very few ambulances in the districts and people who are critically ill have to wait for hours to be taken to the hospital. With the bicycle ambulance, patients can be taken to the local health clinics for preliminary treatment, while they wait to go to the hospital. Furthermore, the bicycle ambulances are able to drive on the smaller roads where ordinary ambulances cannot go. And lastly, the people in the villages have bicycles already and they can maintain the ambulances themselves”.

ADRA Malawi and ADRA Denmark will continue their efforts in providing bicycle ambulances to as many communities as possible.

Kadewera

Author: Lise Grauenkær Jensen - ADRA Denmark

Tikuferanji – the sky rocket for change

By their nature wars are terrifying and can be a scaring lot: lives are lost, survivors get displaced, property gets damaged and so is infrastructure the aftermath can be costly…

Whereas military wars would disperse and displace people ADRA MALAWI’s media combat converges and places them together for some behavioral change mitigation.

Unlike with war-zones the ADRA battle-field is civilian – dramatists, comedians or folk-tellers spearheading behavioral change through drama.

Discussing such issues like promiscuity, voluntary blood testing even encouraging unmarried couples to have their blood tested before wedlock sometimes sound misplaced as many regard these as private issues.

However, this is a fight ADRA MALAWI has braved – changing the world-view.

And when it recently took its Tikuferanji drama series to two of the country’s central province districts of Ntchisi and Salima not only was the turn-out encouraging but so was the audiences’ reaction.

With Salima district rated as one with the highest HIV-Aids prevalence areas the media content in the drama series was befitting as the sequel thoroughly addressed the three issues to the audiences’ acceptance.

Senior village headwoman Che Nyama hailed the organisation for the video shows saying such initiative complemented very well efforts she was fostering in her area for her subordinates to go for VCT.

“Am particularly happy for such video shows as an intervention measure you could see for yourself the way those dramatists articulated issues and how the audience responded.

“Drama and video drama in particular can be good weaponry to fighting people’s risky behaviors,” said the senior chief.

Echoing the senior chief Ntchisi district youth officer Jesse Mwansambo hailed the video show-initiative as an effective tool of communicating to masses especially in the very remotest areas where rurals do not have access to such forms of media.

ADRA MALAWI regularly conducts video shows in remote areas which have limited access to television either due to inaccessibility of electricity or lack of the gadget itself.

Author: Tamanda Matebule

A mother in Mulanje

“The most important thing is to show your children that you love them, then the rest comes a bit easier,” says 30 year old Grace Chisoso from Naliya village in Mulanje district.

Since her husband died in 2001 she has raised and supported her three children on her own. A task that is never entirely simple, especially because her husband’s relatives took their house and most of their possessions when he died. Grace moved in with her mother and has had to struggle to find money to buy food and clothes for the children.

“Life has been difficult,” Grace reflects on her situation. “There are two things that are difficult. The first thing is raising enough money on my own to look after the kids properly. The second thing is bringing up the children, you know, moulding them, guiding them on how to behave.”

Though her own family have supported her in her struggle, they are not in a position, where they can help her out materially. So when Grace joined the, ADRA initiative, LEFAM (let's fight AIDS in Malawi) farmer group last year it was a big relief. The group has just harvested their maize, and Grace really feels she has benefitted from the project. She has maize enough now - not only for her family but she will be able to sell a bit as well.

Single parents’ choice

Though the family is very poor, Grace is happy about her choice to stay with her children.

“A lot of my friends have advised me to just leave the children with my mother and then go out as a sex worker. But I said no, I will not take that route - it is not the best for my children,” Grace narrates. She says, that most women, who have lost a husband, either opt to get remarried or work as commercial sex workers. ”But you know, if you take that road of commercial sex work, chances of staying alive long enough to raise your children is very slim”

Rather Grace is considering going into the egg business.

Being a single parent is never easy, and in the upbringing of her children she often misses having her husband around.

“Within the family setup you definitely need support from the husband. Sometimes the word from the husband carries more weight than the word from the mother. So it is sometimes difficult.” Her two sons are 11 and 13 now, and often times they could use some fatherly advice but Grace does what she can. She suspects, that it will be easier with her youngest daughter Linda.

Support from the women

It has been tough on Grace to watch how her children suffer from the loss of their father. Especially her eldest son Lawrence, who was 7 when his father passed away, took it hard. “At that age he was aware of what was happening, so it affected him very much. The two others were still quite small but now they are realising that there is no father around,” Grace says.

She talks about how the children are slowly realising that their lives might have been different if their father was still around. ” It affects them, especially when they see their fellow children with their fathers, the love that they get from them. And they only get advice from one side.”

Grace has found support in the, ADRA initiative, LEFAM women’s group that meet every Tuesday to discuss different topics such as domestic violence, voluntary HIV testing or how the community can deal with the growing number of orphans. The possibility to openly discuss the hardships, she is facing, with her fellow women in the village has lifted a burden from her shoulders. “I get a lot of moral support from my family, but the ladies from the women’s club, that is where I get most of the support.” 

Grace Chisoso is also a volunteer Home Based Care provider in her village who helps taking care of aids patients who are feeling very ill.

Author: Lise Grauenkær Jensen - ADRA Denmark

Bicycle ambulances to the rescue

Malawi is one country with a deficit of health facilities in the rural communities. It takes one to travel fifteen to twenty kilometres to access the nearest medical centre. With such long distances, it becomes difficult for the sickly and even their guardians to think of accessing clinical medical help, thereby resorting to witch doctors for medical assistance. Only when conditions deteriorate and become more serious is when people start thinking about taking the chronically ill to medical centres.

Bicycles and wheel barrows are the means of transport to ferry the patients. It normally becomes difficult for the patient to be transported on such because of the positioning of the patient and in some in most these sickly would not reach the clinics alive; they pass away on the way.

Having realised some of these problems in the areas where ADRA is operating, it was found that the best way to alleviate the problem was to provide these communities with bicycle ambulances which would aid and reduce transportation problems of the chronically ill. These would be stationed at the chief’s residence and be operated by the HBC committees who in turn would look in the welfare and the smooth operations and repairs of the ambulance. A partnerships with ADRA Denmark Business Club enabled ADRA Malawi to provide the first 6 bicycle ambulances.

Speaking at one of the sites of presentation in Chiradzulu district, Chief Kadewere, on behalf of his subjects thanked ADRA Malawi for the donation which came at the opportune time when many people were living with the HIV pandemic and had no means to travel to health centres. He also promised that proper care would be taken to maintain the condition of the ambulance at all times. And speaking for ADRA Malawi, District Coordinator for Chiradzulu Mrs Ethel Dzimbiri, urged the community to look at the bicycle ambulance not as an asset for the HBC committee only but as their own. She went on to plead with the committee to use the ambulance for ferrying patients and not bags of maize to the grinding mill and any other duties.

This donation is a milestone in alleviating transport problems faced by communities to ferry patients.

By: Edson Gunsalu - Communications Department/ADRA Malawi Lefam Project

Review of LEFAM Project

The Danish funded project Let’s fight HIV/AIDS in Malawi (LEFAM) has now been running for just over 2 years and it was time for a mid-term review to follow-up on the progress of the implementation and to assess whether any changes should be made in the strategies used to achieve our set goals.

A team of 4 consultants were hired to carry out the review and the team included 1 Ugandan, 2 Danes and 1 Malawian and was carried out over a 2 week period in the month of April 2009. Key members of the project staff and representatives from ADRA Denmark also participated in the review. The review was conducted in 3 of the 5 implementation areas and included Mchinji, Machinga and Chiradzula Districts.

Many different stakeholders participated in focus group discussions during the 2 weeks including government officials from the districts, religious and traditional leaders, members of the targeted communities involved in the project activities like youth groups and farmer groups, project staff and leaders from ADRA Malawi administration.

The main focus of the project is to strengthen the communities through activities of HIV prevention and awareness, mitigation of the impact of HIV/AIDS and finally creating awareness and action on human right issues. The overall strategy is capacity building of both individuals and the communities at large in order for them to be able to act on their problems and create social change in their communities. One of the main methodologies is to use dialogue among individuals and groups to engage them in taking action on improving the situation of the communities.

Thus the review was aimed at assessing whether the project has been able to take its beneficiaries and targeted communities beyond mere awareness into creating social change, e.g. understood as people taking action into changing social norms, advocating for own rights and holding leaders accountable for their responsibilities.

Some of the preliminary findings from the review are that significant positive changes and improvement in health and social life have been made in the project sites and the project has managed to open up spaces for dialogue and discussions in the communities about issues like stigmatisation of HIV positive people and cultural and social norms. The youth has been engaged in rising awareness on HIV/AIDS in their communities and people living with HIV/AIDS have benefitted much from Home Based Care. One of the activities with the greatest success is gathering people in farmer clubs and improving their knowledge on farming methods which has improved the produce of the households and thus the resilience of people in their everyday lives. An area which on the other hand has faced some difficulties is awareness on rights and creating an environment where people know how to act on the problematic issues.

Now, after the review, what remains for the last months of the project is to implement the remaining activities according to the recommendations given by the review team and to develop an exit strategy in order to try to ensure that the communities will continue with their activities when the project staff no longer is there to supervise the activities.

Author: Anja Larsen - ADRA Denmark