By Penelope Paliani-Kamanga
To glance at seventeen-year-old Rose, a tall, slender Ngoni girl with sleepy brown eyes, a slow sweet grin, four earrings on each ear and a butterfly prominently tattooed on her left hand, you might guess this teenager has witnessed a bit of life. And you would be right.
She has seen it all, she has been in and out of hospital her whole childhood. She has suffered from meningitis, shingles, tuberculosis you name it, taken different kinds of drugs and always wondered why she had to suffer like this.
Rose contracted HIV at birth from her mother Nyachisi, who succumbed to AIDS when Rose was just five; she says she never really had a chance to get to know her mother and only got to know about her status later in life from her father whom she proudly says has been very supportive.
“My father has always been on my side when I had so many questions about why I had to suffer a punishment for a crime I did not commit. My father gave me answers that made me feel special, especially when I was young,” she says.
Rose is part of the 3,000 teenage clients who receive Antiretroviral Therapy (ART) services at the makeshift Rainbow Clinic at Mzuzu Central Hospital. She has received medical care at this facility since childhood.
She says that it is at this clinic where she has received appropriate medical care, counseling, love, encouragement and proper antiretroviral drugs. “Although the room where all these services are provided is small and privacy is massively compromised, it is at this place where my care has progressed well.”
She insists that for a teenager privacy is supreme and when it’s compromised it becomes a very thorny issue.
The makeshift Rainbow Clinic, which is currently located in a tiny room in a small courtyard near the outpatients department at the central hospital, attends to over 11,000 persons living with HIV/AIDS. Yet the Rainbow Clinic was predestined to be a state-of-the-art ART clinic but has become a white elephant since construction stalled in 2008 after Malawi severed diplomatic ties with Taiwan in favour of China.
Taipei had pledged to make available K112 million within that year to finish the project. But when Malawi switched to China the latter’s then Deputy Minister of Commerce, Gao Hucheng, pledged that the Chinese government would finance projects that had previously been bankrolled by the Taiwanese government.
Gao was quoted saying that “The government of the People’s Republic of China was ready to finance the projects that were abandoned by the Taiwanese in addition to the new projects.”
Mzuzu Central Hospital Director, Rose Nyirenda, confirmed recently to MANA that they desperately needed to finish construction of the Clinic at a budget of over K340 million.
“We are currently revising plans for the clinic’s completion, and the costs and donors of the project, which has now lagged for six years. We have already identified the architect to do that for us so that when we approach other donors we should have proper figures for the project. We know the figures can increase threefold from old figures but we shall see,” she said.
Nyirenda said they had thought following Malawi’s new allegiance with China the new friend would finish the project but, unfortunately, the building remains to date bushy and severely damaged by rains for the past years.
“We could have engaged government to complete the clinic but the problem is that we had our own priorities to be solved at the hospital such as rehabilitating our sewage system, constructing new water tanks and maintaining the telecommunication system within the hospital premises,” she said.
Yet despite the hospital sending an SOS both in the media and at large, neither the Malawian government nor the Chinese government or any other organization have so far not shown interest.
The question being asked now is who will finish the construction of the clinic? Nyirenda feels saddened that no donors or non-governmental organizations have come forward to help fund the completion of the clinic.
Director of Political Affairs at the Chinese Embassy, Junchao Wang said in an interview that it was up to the government of Malawi to send a proposal to the Embassy indicating the construction of the clinic as a top priority.
He said in the absence of the proposal it would not be automatic that his government would fund construction of the clinic.
But so far the ministry of health has not sent that proposal.
Hospital spokesperson Frank Banda said in an interview that the Chinese, despite indirectly saying they would takeover projects that were previously run by the Taiwanese, maintained that they did not inherit the project, so the building remains incomplete.
He said in the absence of a Memorandum of Understanding it would not be easy to press on the Chinese government the need to finish construction of the clinic.
“We would otherwise like them to finish building so that we can reach a number of patients who desperately need ART services,” he said, adding that, “We would seriously want to transfer all the activities that are happening at the tiny room to this dream clinic facility and have all necessary offices available for the conducting of activities.”
Banda said completion of the project would end congestion at the Rainbow Clinic and allow for the installation of state-of-the-art ART equipment.
Banda said the Chinese government has, however, helped the hospital in many areas, the highlight being provision of specialist doctors who have made a great difference.
“We appreciate this to a great extent because the specialists have given care in radiology, gynecology and dentistry, and helped to conduct very difficult surgeries. In addition our doctors and lab technicians have learnt from the visiting Chinese doctors.”
Meanwhile, Rose works silently as a peer educator and an activist for the clinic program on living healthy and getting proper drugs for kids, and she has since advocated for the completion of the clinic which she says is very close to her heart.
“It has not been easy and most of the time when I was young I was forced to take adult medicine because there were no special drugs available for kids in Malawi. According to my research children in Europe take special drugs for kids and are given all the support they can get. I grew up the hard way because my father told me that he had to give the adult drug and he used to cut it in half. There was never any guarantee that by cutting it in half it was the correct dose but by the grace of God I survived and here I am fighting for others,” she says.
Statistics indicate that 50 percent of teenagers living with HIV today contracted it from their mothers.
These young people represent a bubble in time, their fate having been born before powerful antiretroviral drugs were developed to block viral transmission from mother to child.
China’s presence in Malawi has been growing steadily since the two countries established diplomatic ties in December 2007.
Chinese Ambassador to Malawi Zhang Qing Yang said bilateral relations have been on track of rapid and sound development, and political trust has been deepening. Fruitful cooperation has been carried out in various areas including trade, health, culture, education and infrastructure. And the aid projects that the Chinese side promised to undertake have all been implemented.
A review of China-Malawi public health cooperated reveals that since 2008, China has sent two medical teams to Malawi about every two years. One team goes to Kamuzu Central Hospital in the capital Lilongwe and another team goes to Mzuzu Central Hospital.
In March 2013, 16 medical personnel left from China’s Shanxi province for a medical mission in Malawi, and returned home in March 2015. One team of eight works at Mzuzu Central Hospital and the other team of eight works at Kamuzu Central Hospital. The teams donated medical equipment worth K150 million to both hospitals, including an electrocardiograph, pulse blood oxygen unit, electric aspirators, X-ray equipment, infant incubators, consolidated operating table, pregnancy test strips, malaria blood test equipment, stretcher vehicles, anesthesia parcel, aneroid manometers, and more.
On a Multi-Lateral Level, President Peter Mutharika said recently at a summit that Malawi was committed to the process of the Forum for the China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC). He promised that will Malawi take part in the upcoming 6th Ministerial Meeting of FOCAC, scheduled to take place in South Africa in December.
Yet construction of Rainbow Clinic remains incomplete, leaving the intrepid Rose and others like her waiting for a swift resolution.
This article was produced as a result of a grant provided by the China-Africa Reporting Project at the Journalism Department of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
