A few weeks ago, a friend of ours came home close to tears. As a public health worker here in Lesotho, she does community outreach for orphans and promotes health education. As part of her job, she holds multiple classes throughout the week in various communities surrounding the hospital.

One of her students, a young boy, had been missing for about several months. Eventually, his sister stopped coming also. After noticing their absence, she checked up on them in their house. She finally found the young boy, where he was essentially wasting away in bed. She found him so weak that he was unable to speak – his frame was shrunken, and his bones protruded unnaturally from his skin. Even after she rushed him to the hospital, he passed away after only a few days.

Medical records indicate that he was battling the last stages of combined tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS.

For years, his medical record showed that many doctors had suspected he was HIV+, and they recommended that he get tested. However, testing is always voluntary. For whatever reason, he never went. As the the virus continued to multiply inside him, he became so sick that he withdrew from his classes and his friends. And that’s when my friend found him in his deathbed.

Children like him are falling through the safety nets of society. In a country with the third-highest HIV/AIDS prevalence rate in the world, Lesotho is struggling. 1 in 20 citizens is an orphan.

With the spread of the HIV virus, entire generations – notably, those who are young and working – are passing away, weakened after battling strange infections that the world would normally never see. Their children are left behind, some of whom are also infected, while others will likely be affected by the disease later on in life. And so it continues.

Lack of education is a major contributing factor. Roughly 2/3 of young adults here do not have comprehensive knowledge about HIV: they do not understand how the virus works or how it is transmitted. Stigma – associating shame and fear with the disease – prevents individuals from learning more or knowing their serostatus. For the small percentage of people who actually do get tested, many of them are able to pay for the transportation to return to the hospital for the monthly refill on their medication.

However, there is progress being made. At Maluti Hospital, counselors walk patients through what the HIV virus does inside the body and the importance of maintaining anti-retroviral treatment (ART) therapy. Not everyone adheres to their medication, but for those who do, they can live relatively healthy lives for decades.

An Intervention

One of the most successful interventions – and one in which Lesotho has made considerable progress – is taking steps to protect newborn infants from contracting the virus from their mothers. The combined medication and support services for mothers is known as PMTCT (Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission).

Six years ago, only 5% of HIV+ women received PMTCT. Through the involvement of countless health workers, aid workers, and hospitals, that number has jumped to 64% of HIV+women.

Melissa and I were invited to join our friend, the social worker, to help her in education outreach about PMTCT. We traveled to a nearby village and helped educate women on what medication was available to them and any pregnant women – whether they’re HIV+ or not – to ensure that they have a healthy baby.

The experience was absolutely phenomenal. The women we met with were older, many of them were grandmothers, or older women who had volunteered to care for orphans left behind. Although they themselves will likely not be needing PMTCT, many of them care for young girls who may soon become pregnant. Through our session, I hope they now feel empowered to spread the word to their children and friends.

When we finished our lesson, the women thanked us, and one of them began singing one of the well-known traditional songs in SeSotho. The others joined in, and we all sang for a long, long time.

For these women to come to this education session, despite all they have to do to care for as many as twelve children, and then literally burst into song afterward….I can’t even describe how incredible it was.

Update: Several days after the education session, our friend spoke to these same women about this class. It turns out that one of the women found it so exciting that she wants to engage in community outreach and speak to women about PMTCT all throughout Lesotho.

And then it’s times like that where the statistics and the pain don’t seem so scary, because we have women like them blazing the trail for the future.