Overview Of 2001
    hank you for your interest in our project among the people with AIDS and their orphans. Masoyi Home Based Care is a Christian project caring for dying people in their homes. By far the majority of our patients will never see the inside of a hospital. Why? We have about 1500 hospital beds available in our province. Since 1998 more the 40 000 people infected with HIV every year. Each one of these people will need a hospital bed about three times a year for between 7 and 10 day. This places an impossible burden on the health system. We have trained community volunteers to care for the people in their homes. I am the project co-ordinator and my wife Carolyn is the project nurse. We also have an orphan co-ordinator Florence Mbokazi. Every day we spend our time in the field with the volunteers supporting them as they look after the patients and their orphans. Currently we have about 80 volunteers, 750 patients and 830 orphans. We try to keep the orphans in their homes. This ensures minimum disruption after the death of their parents. Their homes are also the only inheritance they will ever have. Normally the granny of the orphans will move in and start to care for them. We are then able to support the granny. Thus the adopt a granny project. The try to let the granny move into the house while the mother or father is still alive. During this time the children can bond with their 'new' mother and see that it is the will of the sick mother. We provide the orphans with food, school fees, clothes medical help, and electricity at the moment. As you can imagine, our resources are stretched to the limit, but it is still the most economical and effective method of caring. We strongly encourage the community and the extended family to except responsibility for the orphans. We see our role as a supportive role. We will also start to build some homes this year for our destitute orphans. The home will take six orphans and house parents. We are actively seeking a 'bank of foster parents' in the churches. This will help us to place destitute orphans in good homes in a very short time period. Some of our policies among the orphans are:
  • no school no food. The orphans must attend school (and behave while there!) to qualify for food. Our volunteers also represent them in school meetings for parents. The teachers know whom to contact if there is problems, and the children know we will also stand up for them if necessary.
  • No vegetable garden no food. We developed big vegetable gardens in the community for our orphans. Each orphan family has its own stand in this garden. We buy the seedlings for them and they can eat or sell the vegetables that they produce.
  • We placed all our pre-school orphans in pre-schools. We are also busy developing after school caring centres for the orphans. There they will receive a good meal and will do their school work under supervision. All this activities is done in and by the local community.

We also provide food and medicine to our patients with AIDS. Most of the rural clinics cannot provide any medicine to really treat our AIDS persons while at home. We work closely with a medical doctor, who is also running an AIDS clinic. Food and medicine are the two top priorities of any person with AIDS in Africa. This nutro porridge is a pre cooked porridge and only water is added. People with oral thrush (very typical for AIDS people) can eat this soft porridge. At the moment we buy the medicine and porridge from big companies ourselves.
We have already been instrumental in the initiation of 28 other similar projects caring for people with AIDS by training potential project co-ordinators. All these projects are in Mpumalanga, Northern Province, Swaziland, Mozambique, and Zambia.

George Snyman