Care follows sex workers and truckers along one of region’s busiest trade routes

Bhekisisa 02 August 2016

Healthcare facilities are working to ensure migrant workers are never far from care.
It is mid-morning in the town of Zalewa in Malawi’s Neno district. A man wobbles unsteadily on his bicycle, which is heavily loaded with sacks of maize. He rides past a mural that reads: “Welcome to Zalewa Clinic.”

Inside the clinic yard a little girl in a black top and blue skirt that barely fits is asleep on one of the concrete steps leading up to the clinic door, seeking refuge from the sun under the scant shade of a small tree.

When it is finally her turn to see the doctor, her father hoists her up and leads her through the crowded doorway.

“We see about 80 patients here [a day],” says William Maliko as he makes a note on the girl’s clinic card. “This is the only clinic around here. The next closest one is about 67km away.”

Outside the cluttered consultation room, men in dress shirts and women with traditional-print material wrapped around their waists, some with babies on their backs, all anxiously await their turn.

But they are not Maliko’s usual clientele. The clinic specialises in HIV counselling, testing and treatment, family planning and treating sexually transmitted infections (STIs).

“Our main targets here are sex workers and long-distance travellers like truck drivers. If they are not around, then we assist the people in the community,” says Maliko, who is in charge of the clinic.

On the move and at risk
Because of the nature of their work, sex workers and truck drivers are at higher risk of HIV infection than the general population.

 

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Zimbabwe mixes medicine and tradition for safer circumcision

Bhekisisa, 05 July 2016

Zimbabwe has successfully won the support of chiefs and their people by combining a respect for tradition with safe, modern procedures.

As the winter school holidays in Zimbabwe approach, excitement and nervous apprehension is building up among teenage boys. They are preparing for a traditional, yet very modern, experience and they’ll be emulating their favourite DJs and celebrities.

Their friends will think they are smart and mature; their headmasters, teachers and parents will be impressed — as will be, remarkably, the chiefs.

In an exceptional coming together of tradition deeply rooted in social customs on the one hand and modern medicine on the other, hundreds of boys will be circumcised. They will head to initiation camps in the bush. There the elders will teach them about traditional values, customs and practices. They will learn what it means to be a responsible man in society: taking good care of a family, protecting women and wives, and valuing traditions and culture.

The foreskins of the initiates will be removed — but it will not be done by traditional circumcisers. Doctors and nurses will perform the procedure surgically.

Integrating medical male circumcision and traditional initiation is complicated. In South Africa, where the initiation season is in full swing, there has been a varied response. In Pondoland in the Eastern Cape, for example, there has been strong resistance to surgical intervention.

But the Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision (VMMC) programme in Zimbabwe has been so successful that nearly 600 000 adolescent and adult men have been medically circumcised since it was started in 2009. This is about 50% of the national target to be reached by 2017.

More than two-thirds (70%) of the initiates are adolescents between the ages of 10 and 19 years. Although the programme is targeting males between the ages of 13 to 29 years, boys seem to respond more favourably to campaigns using role models and peer influence.

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The village where dozens of young girls have been raped is still waiting for justice

The Guardian, August 3, 2016

A nearly full moon was the only light over the village of Kavumu, in eastern Congo, on the night of 26 December 2015. Just before midnight, a figure slipped quietly through the shadows along the red-earth tracts between huts and entered one of the wooden shacks. The intruder proceeded to take a three-year-old girl called Denise from the bed where she was sleeping next to her mother. Also at home that night were two women and three other children. None of them heard anything.

Denise’s mother woke up after midnight and groped for her daughter next to her on the mattress. She found only an empty space. An iron bar normally used to block the door was on the floor. A machete was stabbed into the ground outside the entrance. The women recognised the signs: this scenario had been repeated in Kavumu many times in the previous two and a half years.

The family woke the neighbours, who spanned out into search parties. In a nearby field, beneath stalks of sorghum, corn, and desiccated cassava, they soon found Denise lying on the wet dirt, wearing only her fuchsia-pink hoodie. She had been raped and was badly hurt, bleeding from between her legs. They took her straight to the local hospital and one of the search party was sent to notify the village chief and police of the attack. Denise spent the night in hospital and the next morning, she was sent to Panzi hospital, a much larger facility in the provincial capital of Bukavu. In the early days of the attacks, untrained medical staff in Kavumu had been washing away evidence in an attempt to clean up the girls, but Panzi doctors had since instructed them on how to treat victims of rape in a way that preserved forensic evidence.

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