St Chad’s Parish Church Poulton-le-Fylde SPRING 2009   News from St James Hospital, Mantšonyane, Lesotho   The remote Ha Lephoi Clinic is to start providing basic education for boys from farming communities who receive little or no schooling.   The boys will be taught reading and writing, and taught about HIV/AIDS. The boys who are mostly cattle herders have already shown an interest: some are HIV positive and receiving anti-retroviral treatment, while others have been visiting the clinic to ask for condoms and information on HIV.   Meanwhile, USPG Mission Companion Dr Elizabeth Hills is hoping to start providing women in the region with education on home deliveries.   As an example of a typical case, Dr Hills referred to a 19 yr old mother who was left with an infection after a home delivery, while her premature baby became sick.   Dr Hills is hopeful that the young mother and her baby will get better. But she is hoping that educating mothers and grandmothers in home delivery will prevent similar cases from happening often in the future.   News from St. James's Mission Hospital       A medium sized hospital that serves 76,116 people in the surrounding mountainous area.   Access to clinics and patients from the hospital is extremely difficult. It now has a 4x4 Landcruiser so the hospital can run home-based care projects, provide follow up for patients and extend the coverage of the HIV and Aids programme, as well as emergency transport when needed.   Nurse Me Matholo Fusi explains that, "We will not have a problem to perform follow ups and understand the problems of the support groups [of people living with HIV and AIDS] and others face. The vehicle alleviates issues of transportation in the hospital."   FOR MORE INFORMATION CLICK ON THE FOLLOWING LINK   www.sentebale.org/home/PreviousGrants.html SUMMER 2007   Celebrations were held at St James’ Hospital in April when a truck was received as a gift from the Japanese Government to support people living with HIV.   The truck will be used to bring farming supplies, food, equipment for HIV education and food produced by people living with HIV for sale.   The donated truck is remarkably long but the road from Maseru is being widened and some bends flattened out, so it should not get stuck as some trucks have in the past. The hope is that soon the hospital will get better telephone contact too, and possibly even the internet.   This would make the place more tolerable for younger staff, as well as making administration easier and reducing expenditure on frequent visits to Maseru in order to communicate with the outside world. WINTER 2007 HIV/AIDS care progresses. St James’ Hospital now has two counsellors, who have been seconded by the government. “It still seems to take a long time to get counselling done, though,” reports USPG mission companion Dr Elizabeth Hills. She brought a 12 yr old girl and her grandmother back from Ha Mafa clinic, hoping that both of them could receive antiretroviral drug adherence counselling. But it was not done before the grandmother announced that she had to go back home as there were other grandchildren she needed to care for and she’d already been away from them for one night. “I hope the girl will cope with the counselling,” said Elizabeth. “She is in Standard 5 at school and of an age when she really needs to understand her diagnosis. There are so many children who need to get onto a treatment programme.” Sometimes an older sister will bring children to the clinic. One day, three children were brought by a neighbour to the primary healthcare clinic: a thin girl of 12, who was carrying her one year old niece on her back and leading a boy of 4 yrs. The boy was of relatively normal weight; following the local tradition of feeding men first. When the 12 yr old girl goes to school, the 4yr old boy cares for the little one who is still not sitting. Delayed milestones such as this are taken as evidence of HIV involvement of the brain and a reason to start treatment with antiretroviral drugs.