UNICEF support keeps HIV positive mothers healthy and happy

The cheerful middle-aged lady welcomes us like we were long-lost friends. We found her outside one of the houses lining the highway to Kampala just a kilometre from Namayingo town, found on Lake Victoria’s shore in eastern Uganda. She calls out to her teenage daughter who quickly brings us stools to sit.

The equally cheerful teenager called Shadia Naisumba will soon make twenty and is a mother of two boys, three-year-old Muhammad and Madoligo who is three months. Shadia is HIV positive but luckily, her first born was confirmed negative after all the requisite tests, and the second one is also still testing negative.

The boys’ grandmother, 45-year old Florence Namuhoma, is deeply regretful over her daughter’s positive HIV status.

But that is where her regret stops, for she is very positive about life, thanks to the treatment and counselling she and her daughter have been undergoing courtesy of Mother 2 Mothers network of peers and mother mentors working with Baylor Uganda, supported by UNICEF. These partners ensure that Namuhoma, Shadia and other community members living positively in Namayingo never run out of their ARV medicine, take it correctly and on time and undergo routine checking.

The happiness in this homestead which grows most their food on borrowed plots is amazing.  Their steady monetary income is a monthly twenty thousand shillings (about US$7) sent by Shadia’s fiancé who works as a local guard in Kenya. Once the money hits her mobile money phone account, Shadia uses it to buy a bar of laundry soap, a litre of cooking oil, a kilo of sugar and three kilograms of flour for porridge.

Namuhoma learnt of her status after her own daughter tested positive during her first pregnancy pre-natal tests, prompting her to also be tested. Shadia’s fiancé is negative. They get his blood checked whenever he comes visiting every three or so months and he remains negative.
 
Mother and daughter remain relatively healthy because they adhere to both the times and dosage of their ART. They always get calls from their peer leaders who remind them to swallow their medicine regularly and always go for a refill of the drugs. Shadia’s strict adherence to treatment is what protects her fiancé from contracting HIV. 

Delia Wandera, a mentor mother on the Mother 2 Mother network confirms the duo’s adherence and testimonies.

“I work in a team of four mentor mothers and I have in my phone here over eight hundred contacts of women whom we monitor, counsel and call on phone to remind them to go for their checkup, get refills and generally keep encouraging,” she says.
The mentor mothers are very busy, operating in the district whose total population of 285,000 has many young mothers.

Across the municipality, we meet another happy mother of a boy and a girl, a junior wife in an Islamic marriage of two wives. Rehema Nakadama is HIV positive, like her husband and co-wife. But her three and a half-year-old son Bashom Ighanga was declared free of HIV after all the requisite tests, thanks to the trio’s adherence to PMTC regimen. Her lovely daughter Rahmat Kagoya, 5 months old, is so far also testing negative.