South Africa
HIV and AIDS
Established in 1977 to fight against the injustices of apartheid, the Diocese of Grahamstown Department of Social Responsibility team continues today to battle with poverty and human rights challenges that are legacies of that era.
AngliCORD and the Diocese of Grahamstown DSR have been in partnership since 1999.
DSR’s HIV and AIDS program is part of a three year AusAID-AngliCORD funded program called Building HIV Resilient Communities in Africa.
HIV and AIDS are taking a particularly heavy toll on poor communities in the Diocese, but the DSR are mentoring church-based Support Groups to provide life-saving hope and care.
“Auditing for orphans”
The DSR’s dynamic HIV and AIDS Coordinator, Judy Silwana, is encouraging these Support Groups to take a closer look at their own communities for orphaned and vulnerable children.
Prompted by the challenge, an “audit” by one group quickly found 50 children! This group is now regularly providing these children with surplus vegetables from their community garden.
In Keishammahoek, efforts to reach orphaned children began in 2004, due to serious problems with children involved with crime.
An isolated and impoverished community, Keishammahoek offers little for young people other than Shebeens. Girls and boys as young as 10 years are visiting these Shebeens, with many quickly becoming sexually active and involved in crime.
A Support Group now meets twice a week in Keishammahoek, and provides daily after school care for 40 orphan children, helping their homework, and running activities such as singing, traditional dances & drumming.
Information about HIV and AIDS is provided as an entertaining quiz, with an effort to break the cycle of infection.
A volunteer-run centre is now also encouraging Drug Adherence and providing information, after Judy realised that some Support Group members on ART stopped their medication when they were feeling better. Stopping ART can lead to HIV positive people becoming dangerously ill very quickly.
Organic Gardens
Ray Magida, DSR’s Land Officer, has introduced organic gardening and permaculture to community groups in the Diocese.
These vegetables gardens, initiated and owned by community groups, aim to improve access to food for people who infected and affected by HIV & AIDS within their communities.
Ray is encouraging monthly vegetable planting, the use of locally available composts, manure and mulch. Training is also being offered in marketing the vegetables for sale in local markets.
Family gardens are also being encouraged, to develop self-sustaining gardens with vegetables and small live stock such as goats & chickens for meat, eggs and milk.
The community garden group told Beth that the DSR have helped them “start afresh”.
“We were (gardening) as individuals, and were using money to buy fertiliser & manure. Now we are networking together - we hired donkeys to plough the plots, and (pooled) money to buy seeds. We have a constitution and business plan, have become part of the Permaculture Association and are networking with others."