Planting Hope: The Blue Roof Clinic Community Garden

The Blue Roof Clinic in Durban, South Africa is the first clinic wholly owned and operated by Keep a Child Alive, bringing our dream of comprehensive HIV care to life in a community where its services are desperately and urgently needed. The clinic moved into its brand new state-of-the-art facility in December 2008, and as word spreads in the community about the treatment and care offered here, our patient numbers continue to rise!

The beautiful new building!

The VCT (Voluntary Counseling and Testing) and psychosocial support programs at the Blue Roof are managed by our brilliant counselors, Thuli, Kathy and Cynthia. For our clients who test HIV negative, they counsel them on safe sex practices, and encourage them to return every three months to be re-tested. For our clients who test positive, drug adherence classes are offered three times a week, in English and Zulu. One of the challenges we have encountered is that many of our patients have difficulty coming to the clinic on a regular basis because they cannot afford bus fare. The clinic is currently developing empowerment programs that can be offered to our patients in the early mornings, so patients can be dropped off at the clinic early by their friends en route to work, learn a skill and then stay for their adherence classes.

Another challenge the clinic is facing is the need to educate the families of our patients, especially those in more rural areas. The stigma associated with HIV continues to be an obstacle to our AIDS relief efforts. Many of our patients have told our counselors how they lost the support of their families once they found out they were HIV positive. Can you imagine? One woman recently came in for her doctor’s appointment, starving, because her sisters would not let her cook food from the same pots and pans they used, and she had not eaten in days. The Blue Roof Clinic team is exploring ways that we can extend our psychosocial support services to our patient families, to help break the stigma that results in such physical and emotional abuse.

The psychosocial support program at the Blue Roof also offers a support group for patients every Thursday, and they recently began planting in the community garden! You could see everyone having such a wonderful time, planting all the different seeds. They planted all sorts of vegetables, which, once grown, will be used to prepare nutritious meals for clinic patients on a daily basis.

Preparing the seeds

Preparing the soil

Cynthia, one of our VCT counselors

What a beautiful team effort!

Musa, our groundskeeper

It is so inspiring to see how simple a task can empower people. The Blue Roof Clinic is working hard to develop more activities like the community garden for our patients to participate in, so moments like these can grace the clinic all the more often, and so our patients will have items like the garden that they can look at and say with pride, “I was a part of that.”