Letter: Our kindergarten is overflowing

Father Gérard T. Lagleder of the Brotherhood of Blessed Gérard, Mandeni, writes: With our Christmas and New Year wishes, we would like to thank everybody wholeheartedly who we met, who kept in contact with us and who supported our help for people in need in Zululand / South Africa last year.

We have faced great challenges since the number of children in the children’s home has doubled compared to previous years.

When we learned in July that there was a bottleneck in the delivery of AIDS drugs, we became very nervous, because we were short of funds anyway. That is why we sent a call for help by e-mail in July, which was very well received.

Thankfully, since November, we have been getting all our ARVs back from the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Health.

However, our AIDS treatment program is not limited to the administration of medicine alone, but is necessarily a comprehensive and holistic program that includes diagnosis, treatment preparation, treatment of opportunistic infections and cancers, antiretroviral therapy, therapy support, and social rehabilitation and livelihood security of patients and often including their relatives. In addition, in our inpatient 40-bed hospice, we treat and care for AIDS patients who are unable to recover due to resistance or advanced infectious diseases, and do the same in the outpatient hospice with approximately 300 patients per year.

Formerly we celebrated a “feast of life” on World AIDS Day, with a large crowd of healthy AIDS patients eating, drinking, singing, dancing, reciting poems and singing praises to our staff. I always had to quench my tears of joy, especially when patients say, “Without you we would all be dead”.

Now we cannot celebrate such a festival on World AIDS Day, because many of the patients are so well that they would have to take holidays from their employers.

In our programme, we have never had an HIV transmission from mother to child because we lower the viral load below the detection limit just in time.

Our kindergarten is overflowing.

Our clinic for malnourished children has a lot to do and we have promised over one hundred students again that we will pay for their education or vocational training or their studies in 2019.