Ubuntu
“You never get used to death. Each time it comes, it comes so differently. With HIV you’re either affected or infected.” Victor, a volunteer said. Affected or infected. Death from the Virus comes often.
That summarizes the whole of the amazing continent of Africa where life and death hold hands. Where a funeral becomes a part of daily life, where coffin making is the most popular job and a baby suckles the breast of its infected mother because she can’t afford milk powder.
Victor is a volunteer with a group of five members known as Ubuntu. Ubuntu: the lyrical word translates as I am because we are. I am because you are. What I do affects you and what you do affects me. We are all in this world together. If the world could live by the principles of Ubuntu we’d probably be better off.
Ubuntu volunteers travel by bus and foot to isolated slum communities, hidden from the clean wide tree lined streets of Lusaka. They visit, spend time with, and work to identify ways to help families affected by HIV and disability. Victor, Harry, Christine, Lizzy, and Nicolas counsel persons living with disabilities. The disabled face physical, emotional and psychological challenges.
We join Ubuntu for home visits. The whitewashed mud houses consist of one small room, and are accessible by foot. We tread on dusty ground, litter, findings of synthetic hair, shreds of paper and plastic. A boy shyly greets us with muli bwanji (how are you?) . He is dragging a home made car he created from a plastic water bottle with wheels made from bottle caps. A girl dances by, running with an old tattered bra she is using as a kite.
It’s a luxury to own a bra or more than one set of clothes in Ngombe. Any money earned goes right to feeding one’s belly and the bellies of one's family. These are motion pictures of domesticity. These images that mom and I experience are both a priviledge and a responsibility; to share frames of daily life; to attempt to understand the larger framework of survival among impoverished communities and our place in helping them.
It seems an irony in places impacted with HIV, that “The Virus” carries a stigma. Often this is one of the factors for why people don’t get tested. One Ubuntu member comments: “My skill is in connecting, trying to remove the stigma from the affliction. It is like removing the bee stinger from the bee sting; how delicate this is.”
Disabled individuals are often exploited. Many are women and children. Ubuntu field worker Harry explains, “People don’t think that the disabled can get HIV; they believe that disability is a punishment from God. “Why would God punish them twice?” This is what they believe.
Ubuntu works at the grassroots level doing advocacy and case management. The goal is to help the disabled to access the same services afforded to nondisabled persons--to education, buying and trading in the community marketplace, getting a loan. They educate the general public to mainstream persons with disabilities, in the spirit of Ubuntu – “I am because You are!”
On this trip to the field, we are visiting different families who have received loans from Ubuntu (loans that range from $50-$200) to start their own businesses. Selling charcoal and grains made from corn millet are a business, as is frying dough and drying fish. The aim is with some initial capital provided in the form of a loan that business will produce some income (what we call in development terms --income generation activity (IGA)), for an individual in a household. The individual pays the loans back, the money goes into a revolving fund, and then another family is able to take out a loan.
A group of children stands under the shade of a tree. I ask a little girl in a pink shirt what her name is. Jennifer. She whispers. I know how to play along. Like Jennifer Lopez? I ask moving my hips in a salsa move. She begins to giggle and comes out from under the branches of the tree. Her faded pink shirt reveals faded glitter and curvy font, "Jennifer Lopez.” We have a good laugh, and shake our heads at the irony. There is still the glitz even on the back roads of Ngombe under the shade of trees rooted in parched earth, where children pump water from a borehole and carry pots home, carefully balanced on the tops of their heads.
