Nyumbani Children's Home is ensuring treatment for 2000 children living with HIV.

• UNITAID has created a market for child-friendly HIV medicines and spurred the development of easy-to-take formulations to improve treatment outcomes
• Thanks to UNITAID's large purchase of medicines over the long term, paediatric HIV medicines have been reduced by 80%, allowing for the care of many more children

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Grace and Nelson are 15 and 18. They are both orphans from small Kenyan towns. They were taken into Nyumbani Children's Home in Nairobi when their illness became too much to cope with - Grace just one year ago, Nelson when he was 9 years old. Both suffered the scorn of family members because they were born with the illness most people in small Kenyan towns and villages shun – HIV/AIDS. 

For Grace, the more recent memories are still painful. She hesitates, and lowers her head with a touch of the old shame, as she timidly relates the story of her stepmother's segregation of her, in a hidden part of the house, where Grace's half-siblings were not allowed to go. She took some medicines, which kept her alive, but there were many pills every day and there was no one who took the trouble to keep her company while she swallowed the portions of adult tablets with the little water available to ensure that she took the right amount of medicine. Luckily, one day an older friend went to see her and told her about Nyumbani – a small haven of peace and order in an outer suburb of Nairobi.

The home was created to take care of orphaned and destitute children. In the late nineties, the home's management realised that many of the children coming in were HIV-positive. Luckily for those children, measures were quickly taken to ensure that the home would have the capacity to test and treat them. But it was not until 2007, when children's AIDS medicines became available, that treatment began to bear its fruits. Today, Nyumbani Home takes care of the treatment of over 2 000 children living with HIV, and most of the children who started treatment early enough are thriving, go to school and make plans for the future.

Grace, short and slim for her age because she has grown with the HIV virus, is nonetheless a healthy adolescent today. She likes to wear pink and wants to be a surgeon when she grows up. When asked why, she says that medicine is a wonderful thing - it has made her better, and she would like to help others confront and beat illness as well.

Nelson is a little more philosophical about his past. He is not happy talking about the fact that his father disappeared after his mother died, but he says he is happy today. He plays football, attends a local school and has lots of friends. Nelson takes two pills a day, one of them during school hours, under the supervision of his teacher. He tells a joke that when his class mates asked him why he had to take pills every day he told them straight out that he had AIDS. His class mates laughed. "I knew that they wouldn't believe me," he says, "because I'm so healthy and strong. Everyone at school thinks that if you are HIV-positive you're very sick and about to die."

Nelson knows that he will need to take his medicines for the rest of his life. But he also knows that if he does, he will be able to live a healthy, productive life, and make his dream of becoming an IT expert come true.

 

Related links

Alertnet // Katy Migiro: HIV drugs still out of some children's reach
Photos: Nyumbani Children's Home