Educating Kenyan Teachers about AIDS

Jemimah Nindo Atiendo - Kenya

Nov. 30, 2007—At 25, Jemimah Nindo Atieno had a new husband and a flourishing career teaching literature in English in the largest boys’ high school in Kenya. A year later, she gave birth to a baby boy. Then, after a two month illness, her husband, a doctor, died. His doctors were his friends and colleagues, and they did not tell her what took his life.

Though at the time she was raising a toddler on her own, Jemimah said she had extra time on her hands and wanted to be “useful.” She decided to help a growing segment of students in her school – boys who had become orphans because of AIDS.

“I was given a class where all the boys were orphans,” she recalls. Every Monday and Friday, the students were upset as they faced or recovered from weekends without parents. One boy was particularly distressed, a child who had been taken in by an abusive woman who paid his living expenses. Jemimah grew to know and care for the boy. But just as Jemimah learned he had passed the exams that would enable him to study in a university and escape the life he had come to dread, she realized the boy had died.

He was another AIDS victim in a country with more than its share of them. According to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, Kenya had 1.3 million people living with HIV/AIDS in 2005, 6.1 percent of its population.

Jemimah learned in 2003, eight years after her husband’s death, that she, too, was one of them.

She is in the majority of people with HIV/AIDS in her country. The Kaiser Foundation reported that in 2005, nearly two-thirds of those living with HIV there were women; 150,000 of them, or 11.5 percent, were children. And a whopping 1.1 million children – nearly 3 percent of the population – had been orphaned by AIDS.

Now 40, Jemimah is the senior administrative officer in the AIDS Control Unit for the Teachers Service Commission in Nairobi, and is the national treasurer of the Kenya Network of HIV Positive Teachers. She offers counseling and social support to teachers and other employees living with HIV/AIDS, and works with them to live openly and fully. She facilitates support groups comprised primarily of women teachers who are living with HIV/AIDS after being widowed by it. Her biggest challenge, she says, is fighting a culture in which stigmas and discrimination create economic disparities and prevent these widows from participating fully in society.

In the summer of 2007, she traveled to Washington, D.C., for the Advancing Women’s Leadership and Advocacy for AIDS Action workshop, where she says she learned the importance of sharing information with others doing similar work.

Jemimah’s work with HIV began in her high school well before she knew her own status, continued in 1998, when she joined a group widows at St. Stephen’s Cathedral, an Anglican church in Kisumu, Kenya. “HIV/AIDS was not on the agenda. But we realized most of the issues we were discussing were related to HIV/AIDS, but no one wanted to talk about it because there was a stigma in the church,” she says. “We decided to break the silence.”

All 30 women in the group underwent training so they could counsel people infected with or affected by HIV/AIDS. They wrote a grant proposal, networked with nongovernmental organizations and established a counseling center in the church. Jemimah volunteered there on weekends – never dreaming that she was living with HIV herself. At the high school where she taught, Jemimah started an HIV/AIDS club for students, and worked to help them cope with a problem that often remained hidden from society. At the same time, she pursued a master’s degree. It was only when she applied for a visa to leave the country for am educational program that she was tested for HIV. Though she had no outward symptoms, her blood count was poor and she was placed on emergency medication.

“If I hadn’t been tested, I might have just collapsed and died,” says Jemimah.

Unlike so many people in Kenya and around the world, Jemimah had a ready-made support group: the widows of St. Stephen’s. When she ran out of money for her medication and her health deteriorated rapidly, the women came to Jemimah’s rescue and pitched in financially. Her husband’s medical colleagues helped, too, enrolling her in a program for people living with HIV and AIDS.

Once she got her physical needs under control, Jemimah turned her attention to other aspects of her status. She wanted to break down the stigma.

“I decided I needed to disclose my status,” she says. “I started with the students in class, slowly – the HIV club – then the principal of the school, who was very, very supportive.” She joined a network of HIV-positive teachers and was elected treasurer. She became even more of an activist, speaking on behalf of people living with HIV/AIDS not only in Kenya, but at international conferences. In early 2007, Jemimah moved to Nairobi to work for the Teachers Service Commission, which supports the 4,000 Kenyan teachers who are known to be HIV-positive and countless others (perhaps as many as three times that amount) who have not discovered or disclosed their status, she says.

Jemimah says the vast majority of the teachers who have disclosed their HIV-positive status are women. “You can’t force men to come out,” she says. And while she would like to turn more men into allies, Jemimah says it is critical to focus on women. “The burden of HIV and AIDS is on women,” she says. Women take care of their parents, their children, their husbands, their friends. Even young girls with older brothers tend to take responsibility for ailing parents, she notes, adding, “So girls need to be empowered.” They also need psychological and economic support, she adds.

Women and girls are the ones who will make a difference in their communities, Jemimah says: “They will challenge the cultural norms.”

“When you educate women, you educate a community,” she says. “If women take the lead in the HIV program, we can contribute to the national response. And we will reach out to men.”

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Jemimah participated in Advancing Women’s Leadership and Advocacy for AIDS Action, an initiative to equip and empower a cadre of women from around the world with the knowledge and skills to strengthen and lead the global response to AIDS.

You can read more about the initiative here.

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