Aged 15 and waiting to die

For this report, my journey took me to Mtwapa some 30 km north of the tourist town of Mombasa and it was here that I met 15-year-old Zakiya Karoki who is already is facing imminent death from the killer HIV/AIDS disease.

It is also less than a year since she was first diagnosed with the virus and having lost both her parents to AIDS she told me even her education is already cut short.

“Everyone says that I am sick and that it is the same disease that killed both my parents, I can’t attend school any more,” she said. She appeared pale and very emaciated in frame, however, like many AIDS sufferers her voice very clear but also quite sad.

Listening to her, you can feel the sadness and hopelessness in her voice,…almost similar to a sense of despair.

But perhaps what is shocking is the fact that because of her age and the state of her health, her body is no longer responding to Antiretroviral medicine and worse still, no one has told her the truth about her illness.

Pictures of her hanging on the walls of the house taken a few years ago tell a different story,… that of a girl who had a beautiful smile and was full of life, a sharp contrast to the frail figure that lay on a mat in  a thatched mud hut and who was being looked after by a handful of people in a little AIDS orphanage.

In villages across Kenya, the fate of many children have been sealed by the epidemic, it is the same story everywhere I visited and it is scenes like these that invoke the biggest question, whose fault is it? Hassan Feisal, who runs the charity group Coral Wise Agency described AIDS as a collective responsibility.

Hassan Feisal, “ I think, we all failed these children, the government was slow in putting those measures that would  have reduced transmission from mother to child.”

“Because of late diagnosis and a lack of effective combination treatment drugs,  Zakiya’s body is not responding well and as a community, we feel not enough was done to save children like her,” He added.

In that village alone, right outside the orphanage I came across what seems to be a phenomenon of grandmothers, a whole generation of elderly women now left with the responsibility of looking after their grand children whose mothers and fathers had died of AIDS.

Medical professionals here have suggested that many clinics are poorly equipped to handle child cases of HIV AIDS and that more effort was unfairly being put on the adult AIDS population at the expense of younger lives.

Fredrick Gikandi, a consultant Paediatrician said, “ My patients are children and those among them that have contracted AIDS really stand very little chance of survival without proper and early diagnosis and for that the clinics need to be adequately equipped.”

Mtwapa is one of the many areas in Kenya deprived of good infrastructure, clean drinking water and where many live below the poverty line.

 The communities living here say that without access to affordable treatment medicine, children like Zakiya have no future in the face of HIV/AIDS pandemic.