Mentor Mothers

I'm loving the time I've been spending at the Mathare North City Council HIV Clinic.  To say it's been an eye-opening experience is a complete understatement.  Mathare, one of Nairobi's slums, holds over half a million people living in some of the most abject poverty imaginable.  To put things in perspective, the average monthly rent that people living in Mathare pay is around 500ksh, or about 6 US dollars.

The City Council provides free HIV and tuberculosis care to the residents, and I'm lucky enough to have the chance to go to the clinic a couple days each week.  The building is dark and in a state of disrepair, but its services are so desperately needed that women and their children fill the waiting room each morning with dozens more overflowing outside into the hot Kenyan sun.  I was so surprised to find that there's a ray of hope inside the HIV clinic-- in what should be the most desperate, hopeless place in the building there is laughter, friendship, and sunshine.  This is due almost completely to the Mentor Mothers, the lifeblood of the slum's HIV program.  The Mentor Mothers are all HIV positive and spend their time counseling newly diagnosed HIV+ women, showing them living proof that surviving and thriving with the virus is possible.  They are especially focused on helping their patients have HIV negative babies, which is the part of the program I'm involved in.

Without the support of the Mentor Mothers, many of the HIV+ women would be completely and utterly alone-- the disclosure rates are heartbreakingly low at Mathare; almost none of the women have told their partner or any of their family or friends that they are positive.  This makes the Mentor Mothers program such a crucial support system-- the Mothers are often the only people that the patients feel they can talk to and trust about the roller coaster they've just been thrown on of a new HIV diagnosis.

I am so inspired by these women!