News from the Mission
World AIDS Day in the Dunoon
Cape Town consulate community celebrates with the Ibuyambo HIV & AIDS Forum
December 1, 2007
Saturday, December 1- Members of the U.S. Consulate community traveled to Dunoon, a township outside of Milnerton, to commemorate World AIDS Day with grannies, orphans, their neighborhood friends and local officials. The event was hosted by one of the new recipients of the Ambassador’s HIV & AIDS Small Grants program, Ibuyambo HIV & AIDS Forum.
Ibuyambo HIV & AIDS Forum was founded in 2002 with the aims of reducing the rate of HIV infection and empowering people who are affected by the epidemic. The group was founded and is run by a dynamic woman named Xoliswa Bentswana.
The group has many on-going projects and some impressive accomplishments. Starting with a door-to-door campaign, Xoliswa enlisted 52 women to volunteer, get trained in Peer Education and assist with ARV treatment, home healthcare, and food parcel distribution. They also lobbied for and got a clinic in their community.
Ibuyambo works with AIDS orphans and children made especially vulnerable by the pandemic. It has a support group with nearly 50 orphaned or otherwise vulnerable children meeting daily after school for homework help, counseling, games and life skills training. While the children who have sick parents are at school or at the after care program, Ibuyambo’s home-based caregivers are taking care of their parents, cleaning their houses and preparing the family meals. This frees the children, especially the girls, from bearing the brunt of the pandemic’s burden, and allows them to continue their education.
As well as enrolling them in the after school program, Ibuyambo helps the orphans by helping their grandmothers. The grannies are receiving counseling and training to help them relearn child rearing techniques and deal with the special challenges that HIV/AIDS brings to the family. Some of the children are HIV+, some are already on ART and all of them have to deal with the stigma and ignorance surrounding AIDS. Some of the grannies start out in the program with no idea what AIDS is, how it’s transmitted or, even, whether or not it’s safe to touch their children.