An Aids care facility performs “miracles” by keeping patients
on a regimen of vitamins and fresh food
Niki Moore
Lana Oatway is quite smug about the fact that she can work miracles.
“People arrive here on the back of a bakkie, showing all the symptoms of full-blown Aids, more than half dead,” says Oatway, manager of the Aids care facility outside Richard’s Bay, the Ethembeni Care Centre. “And after three weeks on the ‘Ethembeni regime’ they are fighting fit and back at work.”
But the Ethembeni regime is no snake oil quackery or miracle cure it is simply a programme of good nutrition. “The problem is that the traditional rural diet is high in fat and does not always contain enough of the necessary nutrients,” says Oatway.
As soon as patients arrive at Ethembeni which is a step-down care facility for people with degenerative diseases, including full-blown Aids they are put on to a rigid regimen of vitamins and fresh foods. The recovery rate, says Oatway, is remarkable.
“Most people who arrive here have allowed themselves to deteriorate and become really ill. We show them that with a good diet they can become productive members of society once again and can still have many years of quality life.”
However, part of Ethembeni’s programme involves teaching relatives of Aids sufferers how to care for their patients and this is where Oatway encounters a huge problem.
“Some of these people come from really poor households, where these healthy foods are regarded as too expensive or just unobtainable. Even though we give patients medicines and vitamins at low cost, often they eat too poorly to actually keep the medicines down. Then we’re back to square one.”
So with typical resolve, Oatway decided to teach the rural people and the township dwellers of Empangeni and Richard’s Bay how to establish their own vegetable gardens.
“I had heard of a Johannesburg-based organisation called the Food Gardens Foundation, which [teaches] people how to feed themselves with organically grown vegetables at a very low cost. We went to see them at the end of June and started our first batch of training at the beginning of September.”
Food Gardens Foundation trainer Adrian Mahlangu found training the staff and community leaders at Ethembeni slightly different from his usual pupils: “I had to change my emphasis,” he says. “The Food Garden Foundation usually teaches people how to grow things so that they have food. During this training for Ethembeni, we also had to look at what we were growing, as we had to choose crops for their medicinal and nutritional value.”
“The technique is very easy we teach people how to grow vegetables on a very small plot of land and teach them how to plant different crops so that they have a continual supply of food. We teach people in their own language. We give [them] starter packs of seeds, they don’t need any capital investment and they can grow things anywhere even flat dwellers can grow their own food on their balcony in tyres or buckets.”
According to Mahlangu, the success rate is high. “Our gardens are 95% sustainable and sometimes people become so enthusiastic that they start growing crops on a larger scale so that they can sell them for some income.
“Ethembeni was one of my good experiences. Often there is a belief that, when you get Aids, you only have a short time to live. We have shown people that it is quite easy to help yourself to healthy living and this means that you live much longer.”
The Food Garden Foundation was established in 1977. “And we have proved, over and over again, that it works,” says director Alida Boshoff. “The secret to the garden is that it can be done at a very low cost and will [take up] very little space. In some areas, we have eliminated the need for government feeding schemes because people are growing their own food. Our goal is to reach 15000 people every year.”
The training at Ethembeni taught 22 local teachers and community leaders how to establish food gardens at their schools or in their communities. The teachers and leaders have been tasked with taking this knowledge back to their people.
Included in the training course is instruction on how to train others.
“We have recommended that people plant beets, carrots, Swiss chard, garlic, nasturtiums [a natural antiseptic and good for sore throats], cabbage and herbs. We are much in favour of alternative medicines and 70% of the Zulu population are quite used to herbal remedies,” says Oatway.
“Even the rural people have difficulty finding enough land for a vegetable garden, so the small plot idea is very useful. The whole vegetable garden is the size of a door, which is great for people who otherwise would have difficulty finding a piece of land that is safe from their neighbours’ chickens or cows.”
And, says Oatway, vegetable gardens have enormous therapeutic value. “We often find that our patients like to go out into our vegetable garden, feel the warmth of the sun and pick themselves something to eat. There is something terribly restful about a vegetable garden.
“We are now really seeing a change in the attitudes of our patients towards this disease,” she says. “We no longer have to persuade people that they are not going to die immediately. They are starting to realise that this is an illness that can be managed.”
Now that the food garden programme is firmly established, Oatway is looking for more projects: “I would like to start cultivating soy beans as a very good protein source for people who are ill. Soya has a low fat content, is very easy to digest and tofu is quite delicious.”
Not everyone would agree with that last statement, but Oatway is convinced that soya foods would be ideal for treating people with terminal illnesses.
“We would need a proper machine to make tofu and that is something for the future. This is a project we are considering at the moment.”