The Story of Esther

On my last week on the job we were finally able to finish one of our projects we had been working on for several months. Francis really pushed it to make it happen before I left and I appreciate his hard work as it was satisfying to have such a project actually finished within my 6 month stay.

I believe I have mentioned Esther before in this blog. She is one of our HIV/AIDS patients and she first started coming to our office only a couple of weeks into my stay in Kenya so I’ve been able to see this project through from start to finish. When I first met her she looked terrible. She was denying her status and refusing to take her ARVs. She was dangerously thin and very weak. She couldn’t take without drooling and I wasn’t feeling very positive about her outlook. However, with counselling from one of our members and some additional help from Francis she finally accepted her status and started taking ARVs.

While Esther initially started looking much stronger and healthier when she started her ARVs she suffered a noticeable decline a few months in due to lack of nutrition. When taking ARVs it is incredibly important that you are simultaneously getting proper nutrition so the drugs can have optimal effect. She is now back to the weight I met her at and looking weaker each time I see her.

On our first home visit to her place we realized that we had a lot of work to do if she was ever going to improve even with the drugs. We were at her place to involve her in our kitchen garden program which is a project sponsored by ICAP. We provide some training on organic gardening and supply patients with seeds. We try to do as much follow-up as we can and ideally after a few months the patients have small kitchen gardens they can feed themselves with. I love this project because it is so sustainable and has a direct effect on their health.  

A kitchen garden was critical in Esther’s case due to her poor health and normally it’s a fairly simple project to help someone with a kitchen garden but we hit a lot of roadblocks with Esther due to her complicated situation. The first problem we encountered was the lack of water on her property. She lives on the side of a very steep hill and the only water is down at the bottom of the ravine. It’s a long difficult walk even for me so there is no way Esther can do it carrying water.  Her son would carry up a bucket once a day but since he had to go to work to make a little money to buy food for them he couldn’t do much more. She was surviving this way but we didn’t want to invest in a garden for her and then have it ruined because she had no ability to water it. So we decided to hire someone to dig a borehole for her. Francis contributed the money from his own pocket and the labourer began the work. This progress was short-lived as the father-in-law chased the man away after he’d dug only 5 feet.

Why would a relative chase someone away who is doing free improvement to his land? This is a prime example of the dramatic effect stigma can have on an HIV/AIDS patient’s life. Let me give you a bit of background on Esther. Near as we can figure out she is 47 years old. She has 4 children and her husband died 12 years ago of AIDS. He is buried in an unmarked grave about 20 meters from her house. She talked about him all the time and loved to hear about Stephen which just broke my heart.

She now lives in a mud hut on her father-in-law’s land. There is no toilet and she has to walk a ways down the road to use her neighbor’s pit latrine; an inconvenience for most of us but a true struggle for someone as weak as Esther. One of her sons lives in a shack just next to her but he goes out to look for manual labor during the day so is gone most of the time. That leaves Esther alone for an unhealthy amount of time. She is very social so when we come to visit she is always thrilled to see us and I always feel bad leaving her. There are other social issues. She lives in a very isolated area and is also shunned by neighbours and extended family due to stigma. It seems that people around her are just waiting for her to die so no one tries to help her or even socialize with her. The father-in-law is particularly unhelpful as he plans to take the land back as soon as she dies thus the uncooperative nature when we were trying to improve her situation.

We had to get the local chief involved and then have several meetings with the father-in-law and after a month or so we were able to get the father-in-law to consent to the plan. At this point Esther’s health had deteriorated even further and we were concerned about her ability to even draw water up out of the borehole so we changed the plan to a tank instead.

So Francis, her son and a friend met one day to build a platform for the tank, put up gutters, and install the tank. The entire neighborhood watched from high on the hill but didn’t offer to help. It was an excellent day’s work and Esther was very happy. 

The garden has been planted and is doing well and Esther absolutely loves tending to it so hopefully we will see an improvement in both physical and psychosocial health very soon.

This project was made possible by some of the donations we received from readers so I thank you for your generosity and you can feel confident that this donation will change Esther’s life forever.