The Story of Khanya

A letter from Hamburg, South Africa, from Annette.

Dear friends and family,

As many of you already know the project that Doug and I have been working for is in a serious financial crisis.

So here I am, writing the kind of plea letter I always hoped I’d never have to write. I’ve been writing them all week.


But I’d rather tell you a story or two as I still am at heart a writer....which is why I originally came here. This project takes to heart individual lives and pays attention—as a writer must—to the details of living, and often, in this place, to death and disease.

And if the project closes for a month then people will die, and most of them women who are about my age.

They will leave behind children and their mothers will end up taking care of them on small government old-age pensions. They don’t have cars— they have chickens— and maybe a pig or two. Which makes it difficult to get to hospitals for treatment. So they often wait until they get very ill and then they end up going to the hospital where they are often sent home again, untreated, untended, or they come to us. Over and over the story is the same—because the Keiskamma trust has been fast-tracking very ill people onto ARV treatment for their advanced HIV or TB infections for many years already. So all over the district we are well-known and often when we have to transfer patients to hospital they beg to stay.

On Wednesday a grandmother came to the treatment centre with an infant strapped to her back with a terrible thrush infection in her mouth. The mother was a patient of ours for one night only, and was so ill in the advanced stages of AIDS that we had to send her to the main hospital where she died the next day. She left behind this infant, a four-year old girl and a 9 year old boy—all being cared for by this grandmother now with no income in a remote village in the hills about 100 kms away from us.

The infant is HIV+, has a terrible infection, and was coughing and coughing all day because she probably has TB. No one knew the four-year old’s status and as the project’s cars were all busy I drove them up to the local clinic for medicines and a referral for a chest X-ray for the baby. Four women and two children crammed in the back seat of my VW golf. Babies coughing. The four year old nearly sat in my lap as I drove. She was going up for a rapid-test to see if she was HIV positive or not. I dropped them off, fetched them all in an hour, but the 4 year old hadn’t had her test done as her chart had been left behind at our centre. I begged the nurses to stay and wait for me to get the chart so they could do the test. I drove all the women and babies back down to eat lunch and went up alone with the 4 year old so we could find out if she had HIV or not. As I drove I prayed in my head no no no no no.

We sat together on a worn wood bench looking at the faded hand-written signs taped to the clinic walls that instruct patients how to wash hands and use condoms and report rape. We had to wait while the nurses finished their lunch. I made amusing popping noises and she—Khanya—giggled. She held my hand. I held hers when the other was getting pricked for the rapid test. She didn’t cry, my stomach hurt from trying not to, and we hummed and poked each other while waiting for the red line to register whether her blood was infected or not.

She was negative. I drove her down and bought her a celebratory bag of chips. Brought her back to her grandmother who didn’t know how to ask me the result so I just said she is fine she is fine it’s ok. The whole hospice quietly breathed a sigh of relief.

So.

That is a small part of my hectic day, which began at 6 in the morning and ended at 11 pm at night with a look at the budgets and bank accounts and I am an administrator and that little girl is only one person and Carol the doctor sees or hears or takes part in this kind of story sometimes 40 times a day—like that day which also ended for her at 11 pm at my house looking at bank accounts.

If we close these people who will have nowhere to go. We are currently the only ones effectively treating paediatric aids. We are also the only ones who drive up patients to clinics for tests and wait with them in hospitals and push for them to get care and we need help to stay open so we can keep doing this.

My lovely friends and colleagues have put in a lot of time and effort into the websites where there are details about how to donate—you can do so via PayPal and if you are in Canada with a cheque.

We need about 15 thousand Canadian dollars to run our health project per month—which includes village health workers in 35 surrounding villages.

We need individuals to donate to keep us running for about three months until we will again receive funds from our major donors and hear back from proposals we have written.

If you can help even a little please do and please email me if you would like any information on our project. annette@keiskamma.org

25 dollars pays for a food parcel for a patient.
120 dollars pays for a nursing assistant in our hospice for a month.
600 dollars pays for all the medicines for our patients for one month.

An Urgent Request - A Letter from the Directors of The Keiskamma Trust

Dear Canadian Friends,

I am writing on behalf of the Keiskamma Trust to appeal for your help.
We are currently experiencing an extreme lack of funds. This has happened for several reasons: one is the lack of fund-raising done earlier last year, another is the long waiting time that often occurs between submission of proposals and response from donors. We have a number of large proposals that were written to support the health project but we continue to wait for project visits and responses from funders and at present we have only enough funds to run for one month’s time.

Instead we have worked hard at producing a budget that will enable us to continue to respond, albeit on a smaller level, to the AIDS crisis in our area, and save enough funds to ensure that we can continue doing so for another three months. Today we have signed contracts with all of our health staff for one month only at reduced salaries. We are cutting down on food for patients and food parcels while the demand for these remains very high. We are also cutting our petrol costs and reducing our drivers to less hours which means we will leave some patients without transportation to hospital and clinic appointments.

For all of us at the Trust it is a very difficult time as we see patients begin to suffer and we contemplate a time in the near future when we will be left unable to respond at all.

We also have to make changes in our art project and yesterday we held a general meeting for the art project embroiderers and told them as well that we will have to cut down on the amount of piece-work we can give them and that some of them will have to be laid-off. Many of these women are the only wage-earners in their families and though they make small amounts of money each month it is sometimes the difference between eating or sending a child to school or not.

At the same time we have been confirmed in our project’s worth as the South African Health Department has just released new guidelines urging the care and immediate treatment of children who are HIV positive, severely ill people and everyone with low CD4 counts—a major victory for the fight against AIDS—and a vindication of what our project has fought for and done in this area for nearly a decade before the government came onboard. Please find attached the document released last week by the government. Thanks to a new minister of health—Barbara Hogan—and to the tireless efforts of NGOs like ours we are finally changing attitudes about the urgency of treating people with HIV/AIDS.

Attitudes are at last changing but treatment and access to treatment is still far behind. We need to continue our work at the frontlines of the AIDS crisis that will be with us for a generation to come and we need your help. We have proven our success in the face of tremendous odds for years, and we need to keep working to advocate on behalf of poor rural communities like ours. We have changed the face of the pandemic in our area: for example the Keiskamma Trust in conjunction with Dr Baker and Prof. Hofmeyr have brought the level of prevention of mother-to-child transmission up to be one of the highest in the country: over 90 percent of pregnant women in our district are getting treatment, which means their children are born without HIV. We have had several scholars and researchers who have visited us in the past few months and we have been confirmed that we are a model of care for rural under-resourced villages in South Africa.

It costs between 50 and 60 thousand Canadian dollars to run our programs each month. We have made large cuts and put on hold on any new initiatives and all of our managers have cut their own salaries in an effort to keep the project going until we hear back from major proposals that we have pending.

In the meantime we appeal for your urgent help. If you would consider making a donation to the Keiskamma Canada Foundation which supports the work of the Keiskamma Trust we would be grateful. Keiskamma Canada has been running for nearly a year and has a dedicated board of directors and is in the process of receiving registered charity status—which may still take several months to secure.

Donations can be made by using the PayPal DONATE button to the right, or cheques can be mailed to the following address and marked Emergency Funds.

Keiskamma Canada Foundation
14027-106 Avenue
Edmonton Alberta
T5N 1B3

On behalf of the Keiskamma Trust

Carol Hofmeyr and Annette Woudstra

directors, Keiskamma Trust