Exhausted

Flew back on the little tiny plane last night. I was so, so tired...
that time of month, plus a morning walking round Mulenga compound (a
community of 23,000 near Kitwe) in the heat visiting sick people who
have not enough drugs and not enough food.

The home-based care team who work in Mulenga were there to welcome us
and they sang and clapped. They have bags which you can't wash because
they are lined with cardboard. Inside their bags they have some
scissors and gloves and dressings and antiseptic and Panadol, and not
much else. They get some ARVs (antiretrovirals) but sometimes they
don't have any, and sometimes they have incomplete combinations.

They are all volunteers. They look after 150 chronically ill people in
their own homes. The ones we visited were in their early 20s, tiny,
and could barely stand up. We found the first one sitting on a wall
outside her sister's house, where she lives, looking at her drugs in
her hand. She's one of the 10 people in Mulenga who get ARVs, but she
has a very sore thoat and finds it hard to take them. We talked to her
for a while, she was very quiet and hardly moved, and when the
caregivers prayed with her, she cried. She has two children. I don't
know if they are HIV+ or not.

The home-based care people do an amazing job, no question, but it's
hard to see it as a winnable fight when nobody's got enough to eat. I
have all these images in my head at the moment. Where to put them?

jo