Ayla's Aboriginal Youth Internship with CAP AIDS Uganda: Northern Uganda (Part 1)

For reasons I can't really explain I've been delaying writing about my experience in Northern Uganda. It could be that we did so much that I couldn't really cram it into one post or that I just didn't know how to write about the north. So anyways here goes.

We left for the north with these objectives in mind:

Deliver (the long awaited) equipment to vocational students in Aboke
Home of Hope Follow-Up
Prevention of Mother To Child Transmisison of HIV, Luke 4 Foundaiton Project, Meetings
Interviews and Photos for the Stories from Africa section of the website (The two latest stories were written by me, one from the North)
Research Findings Meeting with Communtiy Stakeholders in Gulu
Meeting with field team leader re everything

Some Background:

The north is the the post conflict region of Uganda. I know most of you have watched the Kony video but just so every knows he was pushed out of Uganda awhile ago and at the time of the video was believed to be somewhere in Congo.

Because of the conflict this is region in Uganda has the higest rates of HIV infection and person living with aids (PLWAs). In a meeting with community stakeholders (mostly organizations whose purposes are to prevent HIV spread, treat PLWAs and provide support to communites badly affected by the virus), I learned about the reality on ground of why this is true. This meeting took place in Gulu. They explained that when the conflict came people were relocated to camps and had no means of supporting themselves. Women did not have the ability to provide for the families like they always had through farming and other traditional methods. They were desperate for their family to survive. So when men came with money and wanted their bodies they made the choice of survival for their families. With war comes soilders and rich people who are benifiting from the war. This shifts the power balance and people who would never become involved in prostitution are forced to make the hard choice. During the conflict no one was getting tested and least of all the soilders who were moving around and often had many partners throughout the region.

My Musings:

The northern Ugandans are still dealing with the fall out from this. There are still many infected people who don't know their status and children are still being born with HIV due to lack of PMTCT services. There are some improvements though, women often go for testing and treatment (according to a represenative from TASO), but men almost never come. At the meeting in Gulu one man from the main hospital spoke the truth about this better than I ever could "Men will die men." Most of the service providers agree that men only come when they are bedridden and in desperate condition.

Many clinics have implemented a policy that when a women comes in for prenatal care and VCT (voluntary counseling and testing) she needs to bring the father of her child. This has lead to some creative solutions on the part of the women. They simply hire a Boda Boda driver to play the role of their husband so that they can be tested and treated if nessisary.The service provider spoke of one such situation where the Boda Boda driver tested negative and the women tested postive. The health workers were very confused by the man's strange behaviour after the results; he kept checking his phone and looking in the mirror adjustings his hat. Meanwhile his "wife" was in tears and very upset by the results. At this point they demanded the truth and held two seperate counseling sessions. Apparently this is pretty common with the new policy in place. In my opinion this new policy isn't worth it's weight in salt and isn't encouraging men to get tested. The clinic director in Boroboro who we met with about the Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission project, completely agrees with me. Boroboro has taken to bending the policy because if they turn away a mother who wants to be tested and tell her to return with her husband it is unlikely she will return at all. There obviously needs to be strategy to get men to participate in VCT but this flawed policy doesn't seem to be it.

Before I could beging sharing some of my stories from the north I felt I needed to give a bit of background to the current HIV/AIDS situation on ground in Northern Uganda. I will very soon be posting about the different people I met in the north and stuff we accomplished while there.