Toys for joy
2006-02-02
HAPPINESS for a small child is a gift and something sweet to eat.
Multiply this by thirty and you have a glimpse of the fun at The Mothers Programmes at Ikhwezi recently.
The nephew of the Managing Director of The Mothers Programmes, Gene Fal, raised money to purchase toys for children of the mothers in the programmes.
The gifts were recently presented to the children. The children spent the afternoon playing with their new toys while the mothers met in their support group.
* Mothers 2 Mothers was developed in recognition of the special emotional, psychological, social and economic needs of pregnant women and new mothers living with HIV, as well as the importance of peer education in preventing mother-to-child transmission of the disease.
Mothers arriving at the programmes are often caught in a web of social ills - entrenched inequalities, abject poverty, poor education, and personal and societal histories of oppression - which add to the already undue burden of being infected with HIV.
As a particularly vulnerable population they must be supported and empowered in order to make prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) a success.
Mothers 2 Mothers creates a network of mothers who gain the skills necessary to protect their babies, access the health care they need, foster support from their families and partners, and decrease stigma in their communities.
Mothers 2 Mothers is premised on two simple ideas: first, the notion that peer-based psychosocial support constitutes the most effective social intervention for HIV/AIDS, and second, the belief that mothers, as caregivers, comprise an afflicted community's greatest and ever-renewing resource.
In this spirit, the programmes hire mothers who are infected themselves and receiving care, to become mentors of other mothers and caregivers themselves.
These Mentor Mothers become an indispensable element of successful PMTCT services in clinics and hospitals, developing into professional practitioners of social, emotional, physiological and psychological care.
Mothers 2 Mothers currently operates 65 sites in five provinces in South Africa.
In addition, the programmes are forging strategic partnerships to expand into countries beyond South Africa.
The programmes are designed to serve women throughout the entire PMTCT process: from the beginning of pregnancy and through the first year of motherhood.
Mothers 2 Mothers 2 Be, and its partner programme Mothers 2 Mothers, are the core projects of the programmes and reach the most important audience: the mothers themselves.
In the years since that first discovery, the growth of the programmes has been nothing short of extraordinary.
Mothers 2 Mothers quickly caught the attention of not only the communities and clinics it was working in, but also major funding partners, senators, rock musician Bono, fashion designer Kenneth Cole, and, most recently, the First Lady Laura Bush, who has visited the programmes and invited mothers to join her at the White House this Spring.
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