What is JAM doing to assist with fighting the HIV/AIDS epidemic of Africa? (From Web)

JAM started its feeding programme under the conjecture that children need full stomachs before education will be of any benefit to them. Working from this same conjecture, JAM is addressing the HIV/AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa. People are not interested in anti-retrovirals, maintaining healthy lifestyles or even staying alive if they and their children are starving. Furthermore, feeding a child relieves the physical stress on his/ her body, as well as relieves the mental and emotional stress of an adult or older sibling who needs to provide for the child. Stress alleviation is vital in promoting a healthy immune system.

JAM is currently underway in developing a standard HIV/AIDS plan to work with other projects around Africa, but for now we do feel confident that we are assisting impoverished people to fight off death by HIV/AIDS.

Nutrition is a multifaceted key in fighting HIV/AIDS. JAM'S school feeding projects, garden development projects and projects that give communities access to clean water all raise the quality of the nutrition of the people we reach. One of the primary goals in fighting the HIV/ AIDS epidemic is to ensure as many people as possible are kept as healthy as possible for as long as possible - in HIV terms; to keep one's CD4 count at a maximum and viral load at a minimum.

A guaranteed nutritious meal per day helps a person maintain a healthy immune system, and if we can assist HIV+ people to maintain healthy immune systems, we can keep them from progressing to the stage of AIDS.

AIDS is the final stage of the HIV attack on a person's body, and it is here that a person becomes a burden on the state, community and his/ her family, as he/ she can no longer sustain a job. They require medication to fight AIDS and/ or its opportunistic infections, and daily care. A second aspect of nutrition is that the surety of people or their children having at least one nutritious meal per day allows them to address other, higher needs in their lives such as gaining an education, looking for work in ways other than the desperate measure of selling their body, visiting a medical practitioner to get advice on how to become/ stay healthy and considering to start medical treatment. Indirectly, our meals offer people the chance to change their high-risk behaviour or to search out the means to fight the virus in their bodies and families.

Targeting HIV+ people directly is a very sensitive task, as it infringes on people's confidentiality, can lead to stigmatisation and discrimination by the community, or even people believing that the infection means a way to access food etc. Considering the percentages of HIV prevalence within the areas that JAM feeds, we can be assured that our school feeding is benefiting people infected and affected by HIV/AIDS. This relieves the stress of a sick parent; that their child cannot be provided for, or ensuring a healthy child. Currently, we are sensitively addressing the idea of giving infected/ affected children food packs to take home, as well as equipping people who are providing direct care for people with HIV/AIDS (e.g. home-based carers, hospice workers, the head of child-headed households, orphanages, anti-retroviral treatment projects) with needed resources, such as food-packs, gardens, feeding programmes and clean water.

It has been said that feeding a child dying of HIV/AIDS seems illogical and ‘a waste’, as they already have a death sentence that will come to be, all too rapidly. Our compassion for human life and determination to end suffering opposes any notion that considers food to be wasted on such children. Those who are in the final stages of AIDS are helped into death in as peaceful and stress-free a manner as possible, while those children who are HIV+ are helped by the meal to maintain their immune systems, hopefully to such a degree that they can live a normal lifestyle for many prosperous decades. HIV is not a death sentence, and we hope that this view will be eradicated through the positive consequences of our feeding projects.

Nutrition deals predominantly with the aspect of caring for people already infected/ affected by HIV/AIDS. The other side of the coin is to prevent people from becoming infected in the first place. This too is a complex aspect, as many people are not at liberty or have no long-term ambitions to practice low-risk activities. As stated before, a guarantee of a meal has the spin-off benefit of a child not having to sell his/ her body to buy food for him/ herself and/ or siblings. JAM also plans to directly address the issues of awareness and behaviour change, by empowering the children and volunteers with knowledge of the disease, skills to develop low/ no-risk behaviour, and reasons to want to live a long healthy life. This will include awareness workshops and campaigns, skills development, and garden development.

HIV/AIDS is such a complex issue in Africa that it has surpassed the concept of just being a disease. Its consequences are dire and far-reaching. This complexity however, does mean that development agencies can attack the epidemic on a variety of levels, and at the same time be addressing other development issues. It allows for JAM to work in collaboration with other organisations of all sizes, objectives and experiences. JAM is moving into an aggressive stance in our approach to HIV/AIDS and in the very near future will have in place HIV/AIDS policies and projects linked to all our programmes in all our beneficiary countries.