@SZondi
Growing up in South Africa I had always known about “a
long illness” that kills young people at their prime when they should be living
their dreams. I remember that on many weekends my parents would go to funerals.
The interesting thing is that when I was really young my mom and dad would go
to ‘old people’ funerals. They would tell me it would be a certain person’s
gran or grandfather, but as time went on it started to change and people being
buried started to get younger.
On their return from these funerals my mother and her
friends would often discuss the person and a line I remember often being said is,
“Cha ubesegulile bandla”. Loosely translated to: “No, they had been sick a
while.”
From time to time “a long illness” would eventually get a
new name and it would be Tuberculosis (TB). After hearing that a long illness
is TB I then started to think that TB was an incurable disease that gives
people a slow and painful death. I also remember that some of the people with ‘TB’
I used to see when I was younger were frail. I just didn’t understand why it
mainly took young people. This fear was heightened when I heard that a cousin
had been admitted to hospital with TB. I remember being told, not asked, by my
mother to go to hospital to see the cousin.
We first stopped at the shops to buy apples, bananas and
juice for her. I wondered how they were going to manage eating all that food as
I had visions of a frail person on their deathbed, at least that is what I had
known from seeing other people with a ‘long illness’ that becomes TB.
When we arrived in hospital I realised that hardly
anything had changed about my cousin. She was chatting to us as she normally
would and told us that she had been given TB medication to take for 6 months,
which she did. That day I left the hospital confused because my cousin had TB,
but clearly her TB was different from ‘a long illness’ other South Africans get.
As a child I just didn’t get it, but that day was the day I started
understanding the difference between TB and ‘a long illness’. It was also the
day I concluded in my head that a ‘long illness’ must be AIDS then, which my
cousin clearly didn’t have. That day I also realised that many people are
clearly ashamed to tell others that their loved ones are HIV positive or have
full blown AIDS and as a result they
settle for the term, ‘a long illness’.
When I was nine-years-old my forward thinking father
spoke to me about HIV which we also learnt about at the private primary school
I was attending at the time. My mother
would often not be a part of these conversations, but she would overhear them
and protest without saying many words. All I remember is that she would say: “You
guys talk too much, go to bed.” She may have thought I was too young at the
time to be discussing sex, but I knew what sex is and had seen condoms, used
and unused, even though I wasn’t quite sure how they work in protecting one.
As I got older a friend would tell me about the ‘youth
disease’ he would be discussing with his grandmother. I realised that ‘a long
illness’ had a different name in his family. It was the same thing and he said
when they asked their grandmother what it was, she would say questions should
not be asked and all they needed to know was that it was the ‘youth disease’.
Last year I attended a lecture given by South African
Health Minister, Dr Aaron Motsoaledi, at the Tshwane University of Technology
(TUT) in Pretoria West where he said he believes every TB case should be
treated as HIV or AIDS related until proven otherwise. Motsoaledi says the problem is that South Africa only has 7% of
the world’s population, but 17% of HIV cases are in South Africa. The United
Nations estimates that a massive 5,6 million South Africans are HIV positive –
a figure higher than that of any other country in the world.
AIDS was first identified in people 30 years ago and yet
in South Africa we still talk about ‘a long illness’ that is killing people.
Even some high profile people are dying of a ‘long illness’ and I am by no
means saying their ‘long illness’ is the same one named by Motsoaledi but in
order for the living to protect themselves against a ‘long illness’ the
families of the deceased need to discuss it openly – they owe it to society so we
can start reversing negative trends of whichever ‘long illness’ kills their
loved ones.
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