Botswana: The Network of San Organisations Focusing More on HIV/AIDS And TB Education

Source from:  allafrica.com The Voice (Francistown) 20 November 2007 11/21/2007

The Kuru Family of Organisations (KFO) is celebrating 21 years of existence. According to KFO mobiliser, Laura Martindale, they will be celebrating the birthday the whole year by engaging in different activities. KFO is an affiliated group of eight non-governmental organizations, working in Botswana and South Africa that have a common goal of empowering the most vulnerable group of indigenous peoples in southern Africa. The focus is very much on the different San and Khoi groupings. Through Kuru Family, they are developed and encouraged to take control over their own destinies. Each of the NGO's has activities that they focus on. For instance the Bokamoso Trust NGO, which is located at D'kar in Botswana, focuses on preschool teacher training. There is also the D'kar Trust NGO, which is also located at D'kar, which focuses on self-help development programmes for people in the D'kar and the surrounding settlements. Gantsi Craft in Gantsi, another NGO affiliated to Kuru Family Organisation, is aimed at income generation for the rural dwellers of the Kalahari and Gantsi districts through craft production. Martindale also revealed that that they were concentrating on community health objectives. "We want to strengthen the capacity of KFO for the prevention of HIV/AIDS and TB." Another KFO mobiliser, Armstrong Tingwane, revealed that they were already working on mainstreaming HIV and AIDS in the Okavango and Gantsi district. He said that already they have health mobilisers in these districts. These mobilisers go house to house to find out how families relate, how they live, how they deal with HIV/AIDS and how they can help. "The best thing is to find out what people think before we make policies. What's the use of making policies without consulting the people concerned?" Tingwane said. Thomas France, who is also a mobiliser, added his voice revealing that they were currently working on HIV and AIDS campaigns, designed to be understood by the residents in which it is intended for - that is the Okavango and the Gantsi district. "We already have six cue cards and we have used pictures of locals on these cue cards. These will help the viewers be more interested, because they will spot people that they know and they will want to know more about it," said France. These, he added, have been distributed to all the 10 settlements in the Gantsi district. "We have distributed to all the netball and football teams. The people will get to sign a form after the lesson to make sure that everyone receives the lesson." The mobilisers have also released a TB education DVD. It shows a woman of San ethnicity speaking about her ordeal as a TB patient. The DVD has all the subtitles of the different San languages spoken in the Okavango and Gantsi areas. The narrator speaks in Sesarwa. The woman said that as a TB patient she knows that she is not supposed to share utensils and a bed, but she said that is made difficult by the fact that they live in very poor conditions where people have to share sheds (Mekhukhu). She also admitted that alcohol and tobacco contribute to her relapsing and she also mentioned that her whole family has now acquired TB. Other issues that were raised are that most people in these areas are not getting ARV's because they don't have National Identity cards (Omang). Joshua Machao from MASA (the National Antiretroviral Therapy Programme of Botswana) said that most of the complaints from these areas concerning ARV's do not reach him. He, however, said that had he known about these issues he would have tried all he could to help. "Let us know and we will help you. Communication is very important and it is a two way thing," appealed Machao. Enditem