Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2001. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg) - November 16, 2001
Bongani Majola
He is the project manager for Friends for Life, an NGO that provides life skills to HIV-infected people, home-based care for patients and pre-test, post-test and bereavement counselling to the community of Alexandra, north of Johannesburg.
A day in the life of Fahla begins with an early morning prayer delivered by any of several local priests who visit the project. He then briefs his workers, mostly young women, whom he calls volunteers. They spend most of the day distributing condoms and pamphlets, supplying households with donated food and putting up posters.
"The turn-out is impressive today, because of the International Aids Day," says Fahla. "They do all their work for a sheer R20 a day."
The volunteers are encouraged to take HIV tests. One woman did and she is not deterred by the fact that she tested HIV-positive. She is unusually open about her status; she has no qualms about our taking her photograph and mentioning her name.
Letsepileng Hadebe (26) says she does not know how she contracted the virus. By the time she knew she was HIV-positive, her two-year-old daughter had died of an Aids related illness. Her husband has lived with the virus from 1995. But she does not think that he infected her. She tells a moving tale of abuse by an uncle and a stepfather in KwaZulu-Natal.
"Whenever my mother was out in the fields, he would come and say he wants to make a baby with me. He would then repeatedly rape me until I did not care anymore.
"When I told my mother she refused to believe me. I left them and came to Johannesburg. But last week they showed up in the room I share with a cousin here in Alexandra. So there are now four of us in one room, but they say they will be leaving very soon."
The family members refuse to have their blood tested, says Hadebe.
Meanwhile she has found a family of caring friends in Fahla's Friends for Life. She enjoys her work because "it makes me forget that I will die from the disease one day".
Fahla says it is people like Hadebe who reinforce his dedication to working with Aids patients.
He grew up in a tradition of volunteering - working with the elderly, providing food and performing chores. Before joining Friends for Life, Fahla sang and performed with a local cultural group, something that saw him tour Denmark in 1996. But he felt that was not his calling. Now, he says, he has dedicated his life to working with the Alexandra community to deal with the scourge of HIV/Aids.
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