Letter from Alive Medical Services

The following letter is from Dr. Pasquine Ogunsanya, Medical Director of Alive Medical Services (AMS) in Kampala, Uganda. Not just an HIV/AIDS clinic, AMS also provides infection treatment, transport, nutritional support, lab services and general care. Through the help of Keep a Child Alive, AMS currently provides comprehensive care to over 750 people in their community.

I believe that as KCA, our focus is to provide children and families with life saving comprehensive HIV and AIDS care and support as well as prevention. For so long, children have been neglected, especially when they have HIV, and yet they have the right to enjoy their childhood, to be loved, protected...etc.

One time Leigh sent me a questionnaire and one of the questions was: what can we do to reach more children? That set me thinking for some time and seeing the miracle of how KCA's more than one hundred children on ARVs, nutrition, and care are doing very well, I knew we had to do something special for our kids.

Our intention was to start something special for the kids, something that will give them quality of life and hope as soon as possible; but you know we are also just learning, and setting up AMS took much of our time and the fact that the work is growing so rapidly.

So we decided to start having the last Friday of every month as "Child's Day."

This is a day when all our HIV positive children (over 150 on ARVs) from 0 to 18 years and mothers/fathers come to the clinic and we carry out various exciting, interactive and educative activities focused on them.

We use this opportunity to get to know them personally, to know how they are doing at home, in school, health monitoring, with medication etc. We show them we love them and value them and they will grow up and be great people in future.

We talk about adherence, we make them know they are a point of HIV prevention, we allow them to ask questions about things that bother them etc. We have also drawn topics on primary health care, reproductive health, etc.

27th February was our day of getting to interact and ask questions/games/fun

27th March we talked about hygiene and sanitation/games/fun

24th April we talked about Nutrition/fun etc

In all the sessions, we have 4 groups:

1st group are 0 to 2 years and their mothers. We discuss with the mothers on child health and also the topic of the day.

2nd group are age 3 to 8 years

3rd group are age 9 to 15

4th group are age 16 to 18.

We have fun activities in each group like singing, dancing, games, competition etc

Each time also we pay for an after noon at the next door football field for games, sports etc.

Note that all the children in the pictures are HIV positive

In Feb we had 130 children, 17 mothers and 3 fathers

In march over 150 children, 20 mothers and 4 fathers.

All staff are actively involved and each time we have about 10 volunteers come to join us.

Thank you,

Dr. Pasquine Ogunsanya

Pictures below are from the April Child's Day that focused on nutrition.

Community Members at Alive Medical Services

Age group 3 - 8

Parents and children in the 0 - 2 age group

Age group 9 - 15 in the back shade at AMS