Home Visits

Wow I haven't written in a while. I will catch you up on last week first. Well I had an extremely insightful week just talking with many different people and doing home visits for the Mpoma HIV/AIDS initiative.

While talking with my friend Moses, he told me that the problem with Ugandans is that they are job seekers instead of job creators. It was so interesting to think of the economic problems in Uganda as that. I have already seen many things on the economic side that I just don't understand. For example, there are entire malls of just car parts or just electrical parts or just fabric stores. It seems so counterintuitive to me to open up a fabric store right next to a fabric store, and yet that is what they do here. I was glad to talk with Moses, who plans on opening his own business, to be able to see that people like him do exist in this country and will eventually bring change.

The next conversation that I had that I found to be extremely interesting was with Leslie, the director of the Real Uganda. I told her about the program that Peter (one of the community members) and I are trying to start to work on marital satisfaction since 46% of new infections are occuring within married couples who do not remain faithful. She started to tell me about how the problem is very cultural. She said that remaining faithful is almost a joke here and that pretty much everyone cheats and thinks nothing of it. Another thing she talked about was the sugar daddy problem. Girls here want sugar daddies to buy them things like clothes, DVDs, jewelary, etc and many of them have no say in using protection. Also, many girls who can't afford college get sugar daddies to help them pay for it. Hearing all of this just blew me away and it started to become more clear as to why there is a problem of HIV/AIDS here. Shortly after our chat, I went into the village to actually see the effects of HIV/AIDS.

We did two home visits, one with a woman named Rebecca and another with a man named Livingston. Rebecca was living with her two elderly parents and her newphew. She got married to a man without knowing that he was positive and contracted HIV. The government pays for everyone here to get ARVs and she has a coouncelor who comes and brings her the medicine. She gets horrible headaches and dizziness from the ARVs, but at least she isn't getting sick all of the time. Her mom talked about the struggle to take care of her daughter. Since Rebecca is on ARVs, she needs to eat really well, but her family struggles to get enough good quality good. It was quite a sad situation to see. She said that the thing that she needed more than anything was a way to generate income to buy food. I actually doubted going into public health for a second and thought about switching to being an economist...I snapped out of it though after realizing that if there had been effective public health within Uganda, there wouldn't be the huge HIV problem that there is today. Rebecca also mentioned the need for an educational seminar within her village. I think that Moses and I may try to put on a theater production with some of the children at the school to present in her village. The next home visit that we did was to a man named Livingston. He made me extremely sad. His house literally was a mud hut made out of mud and sticks and covered with a thatched roof of fronds. It was utter poverty. Livingston himself was freakishly thin and it looked like he had several wounds on his leg. Everything about him looked unhealthy. To make money he tried to cultivate plants and sell woven mats, but he talked about how he just doesn't have the energy any more to be able to produce much. I have done research on how HIV reduces productivity and income, but Livingston actually showed me the reality of it and the reality is much more impactful than the statistics. It is my dream to one day be able to help these people, but the problem is absolutely huge. The roots are often times cultural and culture is nearly impossible to change. I hope to do more home visits to really begin understanding the issue at hand and try to formulate some way of helping them.