She was 17 when she walked into the WEEP Center with her two small children. Two weeks later, when I was visiting, they said she was looking so much better.
Better, I thought? The rail-thin girl with the haunted eyes and slow movements? The girl who is watching everything but barely reacting?
She was almost dead when she got here, they said. The other women looked like her when they arrived, but look at them now.
The women dancing and clapping and praising God and pulling me into the circle with mischievous smiles? They used to look like her?
Welcome to WEEP, Women Empowerment Equality Program. Such strong words to make a sad acronym. In reality, the opposite is true. At WEEP, sadness becomes strength.
My day-long visit to the WEEP Center in the Kibera slums of Nairobi was my first opportunity to contemplate the concept of orphan prevention. How do you prevent a child from becoming an orphan? You keep her mother alive. With HIV/AIDS, that means Anti-Retroviral Therapy. At WEEP, mothers are given access to ART and then skills to make life bearable.
A plan is laid out at WEEP and it seems to be working: get women on ART, give them time to gain strength and start skills training that raises their ability to support themselves while at the same time builds self-esteem and self-worth. Their children are put in a center preschool throughout the process and nutrition is provided to all through compact container gardening done right on site.
Perhaps as important as the plan is the camaraderie and companionship the women provided each other. Women who were strengthened and restored held and comforted the young woman’s baby. They soothed her cries, burped her gas and tossed her in the air to make her giggle. When the baby was calm and easy to handle, they would gently hand her back to her momma. While the baby shares her mom’s HIV status, she does not share her mom’s frame. This baby is chunky and plump. And heavy.
I took my turn with the baby, holding her for an hour while she slept. I’m not a person to rush in and hold babies. I really start to like kids when they turn about 4. But this one… this girl, I didn’t want to let go. I cuddled and kissed and whispered words of strength. I swallowed my pride and prayed. I conjured every bit of life force in my own being to transfer on to this beautiful child and I held her close as if the contact with my body could strengthen her own.
When the child awoke, I handed her back to her mother. When I went home, I wept.
Melissa Mendonca lives and works in Red Bluff, Calif., as a youth development program coordinator. She has wanderlust in her heart and a love of stories that make our world seem smaller. You may reach her at nolabluebayou@hotmail.com.
