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News archives
Positively Women's Hero!
Positively Women is thrilled to announce that our own Angelina Namiba has been short listed for the UKC Hero
Award this year. Angelina was diagnosed in 1994 when she was a student...
PW
at the Walk for Life
PW team of joined thousands of walkers in this year's
Crusaid's Walk for Life on Sunday
19 June 2005. Lavishing under the sun the team including
staff and volunteers held the PW banner high on what was
the hottest day of the year to raise money...
Southwark
Family Matters
A project supporting families living with HIV in Southwark.
Positively Women is the lead agency of this partnership
including:
Positive Partners, Positive Children and
Terrence Higgins Trust...
The Moment is Now
PW sent our Director, Elisabeth Crafer, Silvia Petretti,
the National Co-ordinator, and volunteer and Taking Part member Stella Gwimbi to
represent us at the AIDS Impact conference. The name of
the conference was 'The Moment is Now'...
News archives 2004
Positively Women's Hero!
Positively Women is thrilled to announce that our own Angelina Namiba has been short listed for the UKC Hero Award this year. Angelina was diagnosed in 1994 when she was a student. Not only has she dealt with HIV, but has coped with and overcame co-infection with Hepatitis B.
Angelina has turned around her experience of dealing with isolation and fear. She joined Positively Women in 1996 and works tirelessly to motivate and support women into living well and fully with HIV. Angelina has a young daughter and uses her personal experience to provide guidance to women in making informed choices around contraception and pregnancy.
Angelina is particularly deserving of the award for her willingness to act as the public face of Positively Women. She represents the voice of women living with HIV to health professionals, politicians and other positive people across the UK. In addition, Angelina volunteers her time as a member of the Management Committee for the International Community of Women Living with HIV. Angelina is funny, inspiring, beautiful and the most powerful of role models.
The UKC Hero Award will be voted for by readers of Positive National magazine. Check out the October issue for details of how you can vote for Angelina. We all wish her well.
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PW at the Walk for Life
The PW team joined thousands of
walkers in this year's Crusaid's Walk for Life on Sunday 19 June 2005. Lavishing under the
sun the team including staff and volunteers held the PW
banner high on what was the hottest day of the year to
raise money.
The walk began at 2pm from the National Theatre,
where Sir Ian McKellen, John Barrowman, Dannii Minogue,
Jake Maskall and Josh Rafter cut the red ribbon, which
signaled the start. The 10km sponsored stroll through
central London for HIV and AIDS took in such London landmarks
as the London Eye, County Hall, Whitehall and Tate Modern.
PW would like to extend our thanks to those who made it
down to the Southbank to lend their support. And well
done to the team itself for their spirit and determination!
They rejected the tempting prospect of a relaxing day
in the sunshine, for a day walking the streets of London
in support of PW and Crusaid.
There
was no party at the end of the route this year, but that
didn't dampen the atmosphere of the event which coincided
with a celebration of the end of Refugee Week 2005. Organisers
hope to raise £300,000 from the event, but monies are
still being counted.
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Southwark Family Matters
A project has been launched supporting families living
with HIV in Southwark. Positively Women is the lead agency
of this partnership including Positive Partners, Positive
Children and Terrence Higgins
Trust.
Services include:
- Drop-in
- Art and Drama Workshops
- Youth Group
- Crèche
- Parenting Skills Group
- Outreach Southwark
- One-to-one support
- Outreach work
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The moment is now
PW sent our Director, Elisabeth Crafer, Silvia Petretti, the National Co-ordinator, and volunteer and Taking Part member Stella Gwimbi to represent us at the AIDS Impact conference. The name of the conference was ‘The Moment is Now’. The AIDS Impact conference has been in existence as an international gathering since the early 1990’s with meetings in The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Italy, Canada and Australasia. The conference is organised as a nonprofit charity with priority placed on inclusion and education. AIDS Impact encourages people with HIV/AIDS, people from resource poor settings and community workers to join academics, clinicians, professionals, health workers, social care providers and policy makers in bringing together multiple perspectives on current issues and dilemmas. For further information about AIDS Impact please visit www.aidsimpact.net
Shoes, Handbages and Disturbances
I wonder how did Silvia cram so many pairs of shoes into her suitcase, how does she manage to walk in some of them, will she get a chance to wear them all? ‘I’m from Rome, style is everything’ she tells me. I regard my feet that spent their formative years enjoying shoe freedom in hot South Africa and are now still wilfully opposed to any form of shoe-prison. Get a bunch of South Africans together and the room will soon be filled with kicked off shoes.
We are at ‘The Moment is Now’ conference, the psychosocial aspects of HIV and AIDS, looking forward to discussion, debate and new learning. We are also here to promote PW’s peer mentoring model. Our poster, The Role of Peer Mentoring in Developing Activism, describes how in the PW model, people newly diagnosed can move through a series of stages which provides the skills needed for advocacy and activism. We believe it has huge relevance in a country where activism has been influential in achieving what access to treatment there is.
On a personal level, I am back in my home country. I come from the Eastern Cape, place of our political leaders, sun-baked earth, fierce heat and sweet scented bush. This area was the heartland of political activism and Eastern Cape women are thought of as being steely strong or as a friend remarked, ‘we are uncomfortable company except to each other!'
We arrive in the pouring rain; the exterior of our hotel resembles an Eastern European experiment in social housing. But it is close to the conference centre, so when our brains are bursting we can creep away for a bit of quiet and a comfortable rest. “Welcome, welcome home”, says our taxi driver at the airport delighted that I am a returnee even if only temporary. The paradox of SA is immediate, the wealth and poverty side by side, the acres of ‘informal housing’ or shanty towns evidence of the long task of creating equality. But it is better than before.
At the conference opening I join in singing the SA national anthem; it is in four languages, one for each verse. I feel very happy and proud, then as ever, and I feel the shadow presence of those who died in the struggle around me. I am a great fan of how numbers can create a picture. Numbers have a habit of sliding away from my consciousness. But horror is the best memory glue for statistics. The average age of US soldiers killed in the Vietnam War? N N N N N Nineteen as the song says.
Hideous and terrible and it sticks. I let into my consciousness the numbers 6 million in SA living with HIV, 600,000 needing treatment now, only 42,000 on treatment and my heart hurts. Surely, there has been enough loss and suffering during the apartheid years, what more must this place endure? How can recovery from those years ever be achieved in the face of HIV? 6 million is 2 million less than the population of London. Almost a quarter of the entire SA population are living with HIV. With little access to treatment it is wiping out parents, children, teachers and the work force, the generation that is the country’s wealth. Currently, there aren’t enough pharmacists in the country to ensure the SA part of the 3x5 initiative, 3 million on treatment by 2005.
How huge is this task and how late? Activism happens mainly in the cities. In the rural areas, the struggle against raw poverty weakens the human spirit. How do you achieve adherence or even be brave enough to join a treatment programme when to reveal status can have life threatening consequences? Stigma reigns supreme, prevention cowers in a corner.
Stella arrives to help with the group work. On her rest day she achieves speed shopping, a guided tour, lunch with the locals and a walk up Table Mountain. She has an endless supply of handbags in her luggage, all matching, or toning with her outfits. I wonder if the bags are reversible, else can one person own so many? Away from Cape Town where we are working with local groups, we have self-catering accommodation, we food shop and cook together, eating under the stars and discussing ways of sustaining the work we have begun. I wonder how such exhausting days make us feel so renewed and energised. Our cottages are quite isolated and at 3 in the morning Stella is woken by someone trying to break in, she yells and he runs away. Such is the power of handbag defence.
I leave my colleagues to visit the Phelophepa (Good Clean Health) health train, which brings health ucation and medical and dental treatment to people in rural areas. The team of train drivers, medical staff, security and catering staff live on the train for 9 months of the year and are managed by the visionary Lillian Cingo. Learning to shunt and drive a train in case of emergencies was part of her health and safety induction. Lillian comes from the Eastern Cape too.
I spend an afternoon with a friend from long ago, what are you doing about this illness that is killing my country she asks. South Africans in general are quite facing. I know what I am doing is not significant given the 6 million. Small steps, I say, and change begins in the minds and hearts of ordinary people, Positively Women is trying to contribute to this. The strengths and courage people used to gain freedom must be relevant in the struggle against HIV.
We return to cold England, changed and disturbed by the
experience. At the conference we were asked how is it
that Africa is excluded from the advances of science,
where are the north-south partnerships? I hope PW will
be able to commit to a north-south partnership of its
own and add a little more strength to making change happen.
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