A cornerstone of caring

Working with people dying of HIV/Aids is not a pleasant task, but every day thousands of carers around South Africa travel from home to home, offering help and compassion to people in their final hours.

‘Volunteers are the silent heroes in this fight,” says palliative paediatrician Michelle Meiring, who works at the new Soweto hospice.

‘They are the unsung heroes in the fight against this disease.” Life and death are part of the cycle of human life, says Meiring. But, she points out, while family and friends are eager to share in the planning around a birth, most shy away from planning for death.

‘It is difficult working among so much death,” says Edith Khumalo, a 34-year-old volunteer at the hospice. ‘They need somebody strong to support them, when everybody just wants to get away from them.” She has been volunteering at the hospice since 1999 and became involved because, as a Christian, she wanted to help people in need.

Khumalo, who jokingly refers to herself as a ‘kitchen girl”, is mainly concerned with the feeding of patients.

Her expression turns grave when she speaks about the impact of HIV/Aids on her community.

‘You know, often families don’t care about their dying,” she says. ‘They don’t care about feeding their sick because they are dying anyway. If I could change one thing I would say to families: start caring about the sick.”

Volunteers like Khumalo help to clean patients’ houses, do their laundry, bath them, offer counselling, look after children, organise food for affected families, help people to get access to social grants and even help arrange funerals.

The government encourages unemployed people, who often come from poverty-stricken or HIV/Aids-affected households themselves, to join so-called community health worker programmes.

The department of health claims to have recruited about 50 000 volunteer healthworkers across the country. They are paid a minimum stipend of R1 000 a month. Volunteers also help out at NGOs, but are paid little or nothing because of the dire financial situation of most NGOs.

Research released last year by the Volunteer and Service Enquiry Southern Africa (Vosesa) for the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s 46664 Global Initiative show that women aged between 36 and 55 are more likely to become volunteers, because of the ‘nature of the work”.

‘Home-based care is sensitive and requires a certain level of maturity and resilience,” the study explains, adding that many people have these.

The study also highlights the dilemmas volunteer organisations face: most have a high turnover because people move on to find better paying employment, because they cannot survive on a stipend.

‘Being a volunteer teaches skills and sometimes the volunteers can even earn a small salary which helps with unemployment,” says Meiring. ‘But it is true that some feel exploited because of the huge work they put into being a caregiver.”

Khumalo will soon be permanently employed by the hospice and will earn a wage instead of a stipend. She is the main breadwinner for her family of 10. When asked about her stipend she just smiles: ‘What I am earning now is enough.”

Her volunteer work has earned her a reputation as a resource in her community of Mofolo, Soweto. ‘They usually call me when there is a crisis,” she says. ‘But it is extremely bad for me to see so many young people not using condoms. I tell them to ask as much as they like. Hopefully someone will get the message.”