Glocon: Kenya, Rwanda, and Zimbabwe

[Rituu B. Nanda]

GLoCon is travelling this year to many communities throughout the world, to say thank you for the courage, faith and resilience each has demonstrated, in the face of serious challenges to life and health. In 25 countries, over 30 communities will be visited, for up to a week. The team that forms is drawn from AFFIRM facilitation associates and other people who want to explore the vision and direction of GLoCon.

  

Kithithuni, Kenya. 1-6 April 2012.

“I have survived because of faith, SALT visits, and my family”

Kithithuni has been responding to HIV since 1999. The GLoCon team visited 4 homes to reflect with people about what has helped them. Teams also reflected on what has helped them survive and thrive, and what has helped care and change to transfer from home to neighborhood, neighborhood to community, and community to community. Home visits were key both to personal care and to neighborhood ownership.

 

Kigali and Masoro, Rwanda.  7-12 April 2012.

“Before we were ashamed … Now we are an example”

In Masoro, people with HIV had treatment but not good nutrition, so they were still not well.  With the support of a local NGO, they decided to have dairy cows.  Now they are also farming together.  As a result, not only are the members of the farming cooperative much healthier, but their spirit of caring for each other has changed them, and is changing their neighborhood.

 

Tshelanyemba and Harare, Zimbabwe. 14-19 April 2012.

Ready for a healthy future

‘Now young people go to South Africa for work, come back sick, and talk witchcraft as though they have not heard about HIV.  We are working in families’

‘Influence begins and is built up in neighborhood, where people share stories and experiences which stick into their hearts’

  

Themes that matter to us

Reflective learning – Shared confidentiality –

Connection with youth

                                                                                  

Reflective learning in homes and neighborhoods sustains community movement

(Kithithuni, Kenya)

Co-factors in sustaining local community movement for 13 years so far…

• Intentional facilitation of local family and neighbourhood ownership
• Home visits with all members of all groups for conversation and reflection
• Shared movement-oriented leadership
• Local supportive action by all leaders in their own neighbourhoods
• Active inclusion of new team members; response to invitations from nearby communities
• Facilitation of autonomy and self directed community to community transfer, showing expansion of response, by families, children, youth, farmers, women, all integrated into their neighbourhood community via home and local community counseling, so that all families neighbourhood members can be ‘touched’

It is characterised by confidence, community cohesion and harmony, home and neighbourhood reflective learning based on appreciating capacity to ‘own’ the future, shared responsibility, participation in facilitation teams, commitment to faith and future, and hope for sustained reconciliation. 

 

Caring for families in homes is foundational

(Masoro village, Rwanda)

Home is no longer a place of isolation – community includes and everyone is normalising HIV. Picking up ART from the hospital is no longer a secretive stressful journey. It is normal and everyone is talking about moving on with life. There has been a shift from secrecy to shared confidentiality in eight months of interaction with a community cooperative which represents many local communities and their families and neighbourhoods. Transfer has been very fast to many local communities of the members, because of confidence that each member cares about the others, and Tabara  (an NGO) accompanies, and listens, and facilitates conversation about next steps. Hope flourishes.

  

Authentic care connects generations

(Tshelanyemba, Matabeleland, Zimbabwe)

Reflection, action, learning, and transfer at the personal level is the crucial element of authentic movement. Structures are not sufficient. A network of HBC will help distribute ART, but will not reliably or fully demonstrate authentic care by presence which is the underpinning of prevention consciousness. Care is not care unless mutuality is felt and expressed. I matter, as does my family and friend, as does my neighbor. We affect each other, so it is emotionally, spiritually, and logically inconsistent to imagine that sidestepping painful personal obligation is possible.

 

Re-awakening has happened -- of possibility and opportunity and necessity of the Tshelanyemba local communities to meet with their youth before they go to South Africa, to relate, to reassure, to affirm continuity of family belonging, to love, and to commit to being a place of reference, of home, of spiritual guidance, and of identity.