Georgia Girl Speaks...: Care for Aids in Kisumu

The past two days we spent time with Care for Aids in and around Kisumu, in both Nyalenda and Manyata slums.

Day one, we spent the morning with Care for Aids at a Kisumu center in Nyalenda. Having become a supporter of CFA over the past year alongside my sister and friends in Atlanta (flashback to our ReProm event and Red Run 5k this past year) I was super excited to see this organization in action. We had the chance to sit in during health and spiritual counseling sessions with several clients and learn more about their stories. I was struck mostly by the two youngest clients we met, Lynette and John who were both only 21 years old learning to cope with life HIV positive. In the four months they've been in this nine month long program, every client we met was showing visible physical improvement and appeared to be learning and growing as well.
In the afternoon we made our way back to RingRoad to assist with the afternoon VBS taking place. It was a good time to see and meet old and new faces from the community while the kids could play and be kids. We had an interesting and chaotic time passing out crayons and coloring pages, but the kids ultimately had fun!

Day two we attended a CFA "seminar" day in a more rural part of the Nyalenda slums where we listened in (the talk was predominantly in swahili) - pertaining to drug and substance abuse and the importance of caring for your body and mind as you cope with HIV and AIDS.

Afterwards the center served the 50 or so clients in attendance lunch of rice, beans and cabbage which Cassi and I were able to distribute. One of the clients brought her three tiny and adorable TRIPLET daughters and I had the chance to help in holding one of them during lunch. She is not only fighting HIV, but she literally has her hands full with three small babies and three other children and recenltly suffered a bad fall breaking one of her arms.

After lunch we made our way to the other side of town to a slum community called Manyata, where we visited another CFA center and participated in home visits with three clients. The stigma of HIV and AIDS is quite intense within the African culture and many are outcast and ostracized in thier communitities. Care for Aids combats this by seeing each client as a valuable human being and regularly visits them at their homes, thus making them feel seen and cared for regardless of their status.