Word: lesotho
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...hard to believe that these photos are of the same little boy. When 8-year-old Bokang Rakabaele arrived at the new pediatric-AIDS clinic in Maseru, the capital city of Lesotho, in May, he weighed less than 20 lbs. and was suffering from AIDS, pneumonia and tuberculosis. Today he's 18 lbs. heavier, his shy smile has returned, and he plays once again with other kids in the neighborhood. When I visited the clinic in August, Bokang was already on the mend. He was asked through an interpreter why he thought he was feeling so much better, and replied...
Kline's plan for dealing with the ongoing emergency in Africa was to create several pediatric centers of excellence for AIDS. (Four have opened--in Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi and Swaziland--and four more are in the planning stages.) Then he set about finding the staff and the money to run them. Since there aren't enough doctors and nurses in most African countries, that meant recruiting young physicians from the U.S. to spend a year or two at the clinics. Most of the funding for the first class of 52 doctors in his Pediatric AIDS Corps comes from Bristol-Myers...
...already see the difference in Lesotho, a tiny mountain kingdom of 2 million people surrounded by its much larger and richer neighbor, South Africa. At least 22,000 Basotho children are HIV positive, but as of two years ago, fewer than 20 were on ARVs, and there were only two doctors in the whole country looking after children with AIDS. In the year since the children's clinic opened on the outskirts of Maseru, 700 kids--including Bokang--have received treatment from 10 pediatricians...
...Dealing with the still rampant stigma over HIV remains a challenge as well. "The nurses scold me for 'talking too loud about HIV' while I'm [on rounds seeing patients]," Sarah Kim writes a month after arriving in Lesotho. "Sometimes I feel like saying, 'well the majority of this ward is positive so we have to talk about it!' But I realize that I shouldn...
...spite of - or perhaps because of - all the obstacles, the American doctors relish any small victory that validates their presence. Annu Goel, who is working in Lesotho with her husband, writes about a six-year-old boy who was brought to her at the most advanced stage of AIDS. "He was malnourished, had pneumonia, a big belly - he looked sick," she writes. "But mainly, what stands out is that he is sad. He is ALWAYS sad. One of the doctors here said she did not have a good feeling that he will make it. He has had side effects...