'With ARVs and God, I will see old age'
By Desie Heita

In her late 30s, Karin Sheetekala is a Namibian television celebrity. She is an attractive woman with a slender physique whose faced is beamed across Namibia in a short TV film by the Namibia Broadcasting Corporation (NBC). She speaks in her vernacular Oshiwambo language with English subtitles. But this is not some famous TV commercials or a popular TV sitcoms. Sheetekela made it on TV for speaking out about discrimination of HIV-infected people, and the lack of commitment from the health administrators who almost had her killed by the disease. With a population of 2 million people, Namibia has a prevalence rate of about 20%, a slight increase from 19.8 recorded in 2004. Sheetekela wants people to know that HIV/AIDS is real and that it kills people.

The government's strategy to fight HIV/AIDS is based on educating people about safe sex and using examples of people with HIV/AIDS.

Because of HIV/AIDS, she has endured so much pain and suffering to a point of death. But she says: “HIV/AIDS is not the end of the world.” Sheetekela started getting “very sick” immediately after the birth of her last child in 1994. “I was so ill that I said 'this is it'. My hair fell off. My eye pupils turned grey. I had pimples all over my face. I had diarrhoea and was very weak, I could not walk. But no body could tell me the sickness I had,” she recounts. Her child was also very ill. The nurses at the state hospitals sent her from one general practitioner to the another. The doctors conducted a string of medical tests, blood samples, stool and urine tests. But they never tested her for HIV.
She requested the nurses to conduct an HIV test. She tested positive, and on informing her husband, she was chased out of the family house. But it did not take time before her husband also became ill.

He tested HIV-positive. She went back to the husband whom she found sleeping in the living room, “in our three-bedroom which we have bought together.” The husband's family has taken over not only the house but everything she and her husbands have worked for. The in-laws refused to share food with them, let alone cook them meals.
“We had to live off neighbours and friends. People in the house locked the food cabinets. It was as though we were already dead,” she says. Sheetekela had to wait for months to get in the ARV programme. Her CD count was at 233 lower than the 300 CD count, as prescribed by government guidelines on when to start with the ARVs.

The government has succeeded in offering ARVs at the public hospitals in each region.
Now Sheetekela, together with her child and husband, are on the ARV programme. “The three of us who are all HIV-positive support each other. We take our ARV together everyday. And our other children have been very supportive,” she says.
The three have joined the AIDS Care Trust, which gives counselling and the necessary help to people with HIV/AIDS. “The counsellors are very helpful. I talk to them about everything. When I feel down because of the mistreatment from my in-laws, or when I have run out of food, I tell them.” Sheetekala now works at the AIDS Care Trust. “I could not sit around doing nothing. So I started volunteering, helping around here with whatever needs to be done. Realising how fit I am, my colleagues here suggested I work in the kiosk. It is not a lot of money but now I can buy food for the three of us,” she says. “I am now in the hands of the doctor and God. With ARVs the doctors are helping me to prolong my days to reach old age. And with God's help, I will reach old age.”