Hillcrest AIDS Centre Trust
October 15, 2009
Hillcrest , South AfricaIn the breathtakingly beautiful Valley of 1000 Hills, with its vast and serene vistas, an invisible enemy stalks the scattered villages. It even reached remote Lower Molweni, where a bustling and wiry schoolteacher called Maria has lived her whole life and raised eight children to adulthood. Then, one by one, she tended them as AIDS took seven of them into their graves.
Maria, at 64, does not give in to grief. She is raising six beautiful little grandchildren. She volunteers at the local day care centre (“Every day, I jump,I sing and dance with the little ones — maybe that’s why I’m so strong!” she exclaims with a laugh) and counsels villagers who, like herself, are HIV positive. Maria has a huge love of life and her people. After she discovered Hillcrest AIDS Centre Trust and its holistic diagnostic, treatment and home care programmes, she was determined to help others seek treatment to keep on living. “I love my nation!” she says. “I like to go talk nicely with the sick ones. I don’t like them to suffer as my children did.” Hillcrest uses words like “tenderness” when it describes the care it provides. IHillcrest's philosophy is to work at the grassroots level, providing services only as requested by the local community ndeed, caregivers in the new 24-bed Respite Unit for the critically ill are required to spend two days and a night in the Unit before beginning their jobs, in order to develop empathy. Hillcrest, at 17 years of age, has become so dynamic and sophisticated that the SLF will now pair it with a younger organization in the new Capacity Building and Learning Initiative. Hillcrest’s philosophy is to work at the grassroots level, providing services only as requested by the local community. Empowerment of patients is the constant goal. With granny groups, bead-working shops, five registered nurses, 50 trained home-care workers and hundreds of clients — many being dramatically pulled back from the brink of death — Hillcrest is a compelling centre.
You can’t help but feel, however, that its secret engine is the remarkable and indomitable character of the people it serves. Maria, for all her positive energy — she mocks herself when she tells her age: “64! I’m o-o-old!” she laughs, pulling a face — has depths of sorrow. At every moment, she rises above that sadness. It is only when she ends her conversation with visitors from the Foundation that you can catch a quick glimpse of it. “I have one son left,” she says. “My life is all right.” And for one split second, a shadow of heartbreaking pain crosses her face.
In that moment is revealed our motivation for keeping at this struggle until we truly help Africa to turn the tide.