Kwejuna

It's a form of some sort of the verb "to survive." So when a woman produces (gives birth to) a child, congratulations are given by saying "webaleh kwejuna" - thank you for surviving! It's for this reason that the program for HIV + women and their children that Scott spearheaded with funding from the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric Aids Foundation (EGPAF) is called Kwejuna Project.

I've been thinking a lot in the last couple of weeks about the reality of being a Kwejuna mom...what it means to be a woman with HIV here...what it means to get tested and then to wrestle with the decision to pursue treatment and care for the disease. Simply showing up at the quarterly food distributions takes a tremendous amount of courage for a majority of these women.

Reality:
- Based purely on the structure and physiology of women's bodies, the way God has made us, women are more likely to contract the virus than men
- in this culture, sex is ordinary and common place and seen largely as a bodily function and it's believed to be medically unhealthy to abstain when you have the urge, and medically advantageous to engage in it as often as you can
- A man's place in society and clan in this culture is due almost exclusively to the number of children he has. A man's wealth is means to obtaining wives (the more wealthy you are the better the bride price you are able to pay).
- A woman's value as a wife is in her ability to produce children and the more wives you have the more children you can produce.
- Money is controlled by the men in a family
- Because of the frequency with which women are pregnant, the protocol of HIV testing during antenatal care has been very effective in identifying women who are positive.
- The first person in a relationship to be tested and found to be positive is blamed as being the source of the disease. Because of the antenatal testing protocol combined with the frequency of pregnancy, this is most often the wife/woman.

If you are a woman who gets tested for HIV during antenatal care and you find out you are positive, what do you do? You know that every child you produce has the risk of getting the virus, you know that you will die of the disease either sooner or later...

Do you pursue treatment/care (coming to Kwejuna project distributions and the clinic for meds and education) and therefore have your husband find out your status and risk him killing you, beating you, divorcing you? There are no battered womens shelters here, there are no unemployement benefits, no welfare programs, it's all handled within the family, and now a part of your husbands family, if he kicks you out where do you go? Will your family accept you back? Your children are property of your husband and his clan, so you will be giving up the right to love and care for them.

OR

Do you rip the page out of your kitabo (patient book used as a health record) that has the positive result written on it and pretend it never happened, ignoring all of the health care staff's encouragement to get treatment and get your husband tested, putting your life and those of all of your children at risk, but hopefully avoiding the wrath of your husband's blame?

Either way, your options don't look too good. Jennifer recently had this conversation through translation with one of the mom's on the ward...when asked if she would let us tell her husband if she didn't want to tell him, she responded that if he found out her status "he would bury me." With her HIV + infant on her lap, she stood up put the child on her hip and walked out of the room seemingly set in her mind to do nothing about the virus that will one day take over her body and take her life and the life of her children. We can only do what we know how, to encourage people to have the courage to take steps towards treatment and then we pray that God will give them what they need to survive.