No age limit for Aids in Zim
‘WITCHCRAFT’: OLDER ZIMBABWEANS CARE FOR ORPHANS WHILE COPING WITH OWN HIV STATUS
Information and intent not enough for country’s problems.
Jabulani Zilawe lost all 11 of his children to Aids. Now he is the only one left to care for their orphans. “This has become my life – with my grandchildren. All their parents died. Aids killed them. I had 11 children, six of them were girls who had moved to South Africa to seek a better life, but they all came back dead – one after the other,” Zilawe told the Thomson Reuters Foundation as he surveyed his small grandchildren scrabbling around him.
Zilawe lives in a dilapidated homestead near Norton, a town 40km outside Harare.
His bedroom is a thatched mud hut that sits near 12 mounds marking the remains of his wife and children.
“My sons, who became illegal gold miners, also suffered from Aids before they died. You can see the graves here; the additional one belongs to my wife, who also died some two years ago, leaving me to look after our orphaned grandchildren,” said the 76-year-old grandfather.
Nearby, a scattering of his grandchildren wrestled over a pot of leftover porridge. None are in school; instead, like their grandfather, each child passes the day at the homestead, idling and seeking a spot to bask in the sunshine.
Some of the little ones fall ill – regularly, said Zilawe, who doesn’t know if any carry the virus that had killed their parents.
“I don’t know anything about my grandchildren’s HIV status; maybe they have the disease or maybe not,” said Zilawe.
His life is tough. Yet many other Zimbabweans in Zilawe’s age bracket are not just caregivers but are also coping with Aids diagnoses of their own.
“It’s sad. It’s worrying when you look at the rate of HIV/Aids amongst aged persons here. The percentage of elderly persons aged 60 years and above living with HIV is around 15.3%,” said Marck Chikanza, national coordinator of the National Age Network of Zimbabwe (Nanz), an organisation that caters for older people’s needs.
Nanz said more than 115 000 older people are living with HIV and Aids in Zimbabwe, one in 10 of the 1.2 million Zimbabweans who the United Nations says are living with HIV/ Aids.
“There has been a decline in the rate of people living with HIV across all age groups except in the 50+ age group, where there has been a rise from 13.8% to around 14.3%,” said Tadiwa Pfupa-Nyatanga of the NAC organisation, which coordinates the government’s response to HIV/ Aids.
According to 2016 official statistics, about 185 000 Aids-orphaned Zimbabwean children are living under the guardianship of their grandparents. Men like Zilawe, who struggle to cope.
“Most aged persons here hardly have the capacity to produce nor buy food on their own. And most of the orphaned kids they look after are far too young to be working to produce food for their families.
And the burden, at the end of the day, rests with the grandparents who, in a true sense, are also dependants,” Anatalia Mabeza, who chairs an HIV/ Aids support group in Norton, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Some orphaned children say their grandparents offer little or no medical help for the health problems they inherited.
“I was openly told by my mother before she died that I was born with the HIV/Aids condition but now, as I live with my grandmother, who is in her 60s, she has never bothered to monitor my condition,” said Lillian Muranda, 14, who lives in Caledonia informal settlement, 25km east of Harare.
“She tells me I was bewitched, but I’m always ill and absent from school most of the time,” said Muranda.
As Muranda delved deeper into the bewitching story, her grandmother stepped in sharply to intervene: “Why do you bother her? You newsmen are very bad. You want to rule out witchcraft
from my granddaughter’s illness. Leave us,” ordered Agnes Muranda.
Superstitious beliefs like this hinder government efforts to combat Aids and even if a grandparent has good information and plenty of intent, it doesn’t mean that help will follow.
As Zilawe sees it, he is shunned as an ageing irrelevance, yet is left to pick up the pieces of his children’s lost lives.
“As older persons, we are not consulted on HIV and Aids issues, yet there is also a strong misconception that sex matters don’t concern us.
“As such, access points for condoms and other HIV/Aids services only favour younger people, leaving us out,” said Zilawe. – Thomson Reuters Foundation
It’s sad. It’s worrying when you look at the rate of HIV/Aids amongst aged persons here. The percentage of elderly persons aged 60 years and above living with HIV is around 15.3%.
Marck Chikanza
National Age Network of Zimbabwe