How HIV/AIDS Is Redefining Family Roles In Lesotho
Standing at the doorway of her brick house, 13-year-old Anna watches her grandfather, Benedict, till the soil of the small family plot. Here is where he grows the chili, maize, squash, and beans that end up on the family kitchen table at dinnertime. Grandmother Maria Anna sits by the doorway enjoying the only bit of shade she can find.
Anna was born in this small house on a hillside outside Maseru. Some years ago, Anna’s mother, still in her twenties, was having a difficult life in so many ways that it seemed right at the time to leave Anna and her two siblings in the care of their grandparents. Benedict, now 63, knew full well the sacrifices that a working-class Basotho family like his had to make. After all, he had spent 17 years working at a gold-platinum mine in neighboring South Africa to earn enough to help raise his three children—two daughters (one of them Anna’s mother) and a son.
When Anna was about 10, her mother began to feel ill. She wasn’t sure what it was, since the symptoms were intermittent; some days she felt well, and then she’d have almost no energy to get out of bed. She started having episodes of severe sweating and diarrhea. Her joints got weak. She had very little appetite, and as a result began loosing weight at an alarming rate. Maria Anna took care of her like a baby, bathing and feeding her. “It made me very much upset,” she said, “but I didn’t know what to do.”
Anna’s mother died at the local hospital. She was 32-years-old. When Benedict and Maria Anna took their other grown daughter and son to the same hospital a couple of years later, the staff said there was really nothing they could do for them. When they died, they were 28 and 41, respectively. The family never received an official cause of death but they suspect they died of AIDS.
“We are extremely concerned about our grandchildren,” says Benedict. “People don’t live for long once they’re diagnosed with HIV.” The deaths of their children also thrust them into new roles.
In the evenings Benedict and Maria Anna sit down at the kitchen table to help the children work on their math exercises, spelling, science, and grammar lessons. They never expected that one day they would be in this situation.
“The elderly are challenged by the age they face, by the pandemic. They’re becoming parents again,” says Evelyn Nkhethoa, a local community leader who recently started a club for the elderly in Maseru help them understand their newly redefined roles as grandparents and learn about HIV and AIDS through ADRA’s Training of Trainers (TOT) program.
One of the goals of this new club, and of the TOT project at large, is to get the elderly in touch with younger people who face one of the highest rates of HIV infection in the world to discuss how the two generations can collaborate and make headway against the pandemic.
“Young people feel misunderstood, because we don’t think parents can relate to us. So we do things our way,” says Kefuoe Matete, ADRA TOT site coordinator in Lesotho.
This is why ADRA must help establish a dialogue and help improve gender parity in education, poverty alleviation, and a change of personal attitudes.
