Baby Tom Cliford Jr.

09/10/05

Church. Another passionate sermon about how we're all going to burn in hell. I get the draw to religion here though. Earthly life is so difficult that you need something to hang onto.

Afterwards was lunch and then I met up with Robert and we walked down to Mabel's. She's a widowed PLWHA in AAN, and she was nice enough to share her story. Afterwards I took pictures of her two kids. The shot of her five year old is pretty spectacular. It started raining, really just pouring (it started soft, stopped, I suggested to Robert that we start walking, he went out, sniffed around, and told me that the sky was about to split. He was right.) We started to talk more but soon the pounding on the tin roof was actually drowning out our words. So instead I played peek-a-boo with and made funny faces at the kids, which really got them laughing hard. We all ate some fruit that Mabel brought out for us. Finally the rain let up and Robert and I departed.

On the way up the muddy road we ran into Mzee Elisha Onduro and his wife. I love those two. They are the most adorable humans I may have ever met. They taught me how to say goodbye in the local language (I've got the basics now, which really cracks people up.) Our next stop was Alice, another mother/widow/PLWHA. She has two young girls and a baby boy, Tom Clifton Jr, named after his father who died from AIDS complications two months before he was born. Alice did PMTCT (prevention of mother to child transmission) therapy through a German NGO in Migori (she is actually based in Homa Bay, but wasn't able to get into MSF's program there, so travels all the way to Migori – which is like two hours plus and 300/= each way – to receive her ART because the hospital facilities are so bad in the Govt hospitals.) Junior will get his first HIV test in a few months to see if he was one of the many tragic HIV+ births, or one of the newly growing numbers of PMTCT successes. He was one of the cutest babies I've ever seen, and I got a perfect picture of him. Big eyes, a smile, a little drool… Since Alice stays in Homa Bay she is not actually in our core group of PLWHAs that will benefit from the pilot program, and because of her PMTCT therapy she cant breastfeed Junior so she has to buy him milk, so I gave her 1000/= to help out. She was most appreciative. I want to give something to everyone out of my pocket, but I just cant, my budget is already stretched too thin. Although some people look at me like I've got a $ tattooed on my forehead, most, especially the one's we're visiting, seem to know that I'm doing what I can.

BACK