By Wanja Ochwada | Intern, Starfish GreatHearts Foundation
As she laughs in the schoolyard with her friends, Nokwanda is a pretty typical eight year old with bright eyes and an infectious laugh. She loves playing outside, reading, and even hopes to become a doctor or a lawyer when she grows up. Nokwanda was born with HIV, and is an orphan of HIV/AIDS as well, and lives with her elderly grandmother Abbi in a township.
Twenty or even ten years ago, being born HIV positive in an impoverished South African township was a sure death sentence. In a country where nearly 1 in 8 children are born with HIV, and over 340,000 children die annually from AIDS related causes, Nokwanda is defying several odds, all stacked against her, and as she celebrates the new year with her family, she becomes a standing testament to how basic health care and access to medication can literally save lives.
This afternoon both she and Abbi will be going for their health check-ups at Sethani, a community based health organisation in the Kwazulu Natal region, serving at risk families like Nokwanda’s. Community based health centers like Sethani, which offer ARV medications and other crucial health screenings and treatments, are a keystone in the fight against HIV, and a path towards ensuring orphaned and vulnerable children have access to basic health care needs and nutrition.
Last year Starfish and our partnering community based organisations (CBOs) help to provide health screenings including HIV testing and eye exams, as well as medications and medical referrals to over 1400 children in five regions. Your donation went towards increasing the access at-risk families have with health services, by giving to our $3,000 fundraising drive, you helped us buy a Wellness Wagon. This little minibus acts as mobile medical hub able to reach the most rural of villages. With your gift, this basic medical access meant that orphaned and vulnerable children were able to go to school, and live healthy and vibrant lives.
We all know education is the foundation of a society, and ensuring these children have health care means that Nokwanda can go out and become a lawyer or a doctor, and not simply another victim to the HIV/AIDS mortality rate. Nokwanda isn’t the only one, the donation you made to help Bring healthcare to children in rural South Africa goes towards providing accessible health care to even more children just like Nokwanda, children to whom an easily treatable or even preventable illness, like TB or malaria, is certainly fatal.
As we continue to build new partnerships with other CBOs serving orphaned and vulnerable children living in poverty, it’s children like Nokwanda that remind us what Starfish is really all about, and we want to say thank you again for helping us help them.
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