Support Children Orphaned by Aids in South Africa

As she plays in the schoolyard with her friends, Nokwanda is a pretty typical 8 year old with bright eyes and an infectious laugh. She loves playing outside, reading, and hopes to become a doctor when she grows up. Nokwanda was born with HIV, and lost both her parents to AIDS, so she lives with her elderly grandmother in a corregated iron shack in South Africa.

Just ten years ago, being born HIV positive in an impoverished South African township was a death sentence. In a country where nearly 1 in 8 children are born with HIV, and over 340,000 children die annually from AIDS related causes, Nokwanda is defying all odds. But thanks to your generous donation to Starfish, she is able to celebrate the new year with her family, and is a standing testament to how basic health care and access to medication can literally save lives.

Today both she and her grandmother are going for their health check-ups at Sethani, a community health organisation in the Kwazulu Natal region, serving at risk families like Nokwanda’s. Community based health centers like Sethani, which offer ARV medications and other crucial health screenings and treatments, are a keystone in the fight against HIV, and a path towards ensuring orphaned and vulnerable children have access to basic health care needs and nutrition.

Last year Starfish and our partnering community organisations, like Sethani, provide health screenings (including HIV testing and eye exams) as well as medications and medical referrals to over 1,400 children. Your donation increased access for at-risk families to health services, by helping purchase a Wellness Wagon. This little orange minibus is a mobile medical clinic, able to reach the most rural of villages. With your gift, this basic medical access meant that orphaned and vulnerable children were healthy enough to go to school, and live healthy and vibrant lives.

We all know education is the foundation of a society, and ensuring these children have health care means that Nokwanda can go out and become a doctor, and not simply another victim to the HIV/AIDS mortality rate. Nokwanda isn’t the only one, the donation you made goes towards providing accessible health care to even more children just like Nokwanda, children to whom an easily treatable or even preventable illness, like TB or malaria, is certainly fatal.

As we continue to build this partnership with our donors, it’s children like Nokwanda that remind us what Starfish is really all about, and we want to say thank you again for helping them.

Links:

• Starfish website