Spare a thought for Grandmothers:

Yesterday was World Aids Day. Since 1988, it has been observed every year on December first.
According to the World Health Organization, the symbolic day provides governments, national AIDS programmes, faith and community organizations and individuals with an opportunity to raise awareness and focus attention on the global AIDS epidemic.
Like millions of people worldwide affected directly and indirectly, AIDS has reached the inner circle of my own family.
One of my brothers died ten years ago. His death devastated the family – and for the older relatives such as my grandparents, it was difficult for them to grasp this seemingly new deadly virus on the world’s landscape- and how my younger brother contracted it.
Two years ago, my family endured the nightmare all over when another close relative was diagnosed as being HIV-positive.
He is alive today because of what I call a miracle cocktail of drugs provided free to him by the government, that has brought him back literally from the brink of death.
I’ve met other people who have had multiple deaths in their families due to HIV and AIDS related complications.
Years ago, one friend confided that three of his brothers contracted the disease because of their promiscuous lifestyles (his words), the impact it has had on his elderly parents and other siblings and also how it sobered him into thinking about his own mortality.
Most of the people with whom I have regular contact know somebody who is HIV-positive or know about the death of someone from HIV and AIDS-related complications.
AIDS is all around us, no doubt about it. Only the naive would be simple minded or even ignorant to believe that it cannot touch their friends or relatives.
When my brother died ten years ago, I used to cringe when the mass media began the annual AIDS awareness campaign leading up to December first.
I dreaded attending the media briefings or the conferences where officials talked about the increasing incidence of HIV and AIDS and the growing number of deaths that have occurred as a result.
One of my brothers is in those statistics.
So hearing those figures reminded me too much of the pain and suffering my family endured seeing my brother waste away in a bed at the San Fernando general hospital in the southern city and we were all helpless to do anything about it, except to offer words of prayers.
Time healed our pain until two years ago when we were again forced to face the reality of AIDS in the family for a second time.
Surprisingly, members of the family shouldered this latest situation well. Yes, there were the tears but we pulled together and were strong for the individual and offered all the support we could muster for his wife and daughter, not yet a teenager.
So that’s my own personal reality with AIDS.
Lately, I’ve been having other thoughts on the AIDS pandemic particularly as it relates to the impact it has been having on grandmothers who are left to take care of their orphaned grandchildren.
AIDS which has claimed the lives of millions of people has also opened up a generation of grandmothers, particularly in poor countries even in some of our Caribbean countries to take care of orphaned grandchildren, some who are HIV-positive.
United Nations figures state that at  least 12 million children in Africa have lost one or both parents because of AIDS, representing 80 percent of all AIDS orphans in the developing world.
The number of orphans in Africa has increased by 50 percent since 1990 while falling in other regions. The United Nations says there will be 53 million by 2010.
We’ve seen on our televisions, the grandmothers in Africa, dubbed the “AIDS grannies” who risk and sometimes sacrifice their lives to take care of their orphaned grandchildren after burying a son or a daughter or several of their children who died from HIV and AIDS complications.
Although I’ve seen more of these real life stories in the African continent, I’m sure it’s the same throughout the regions of the world where grandmothers, the primary care-giver, struggling through their poverty, with little money, scraps of food and almost no support,  take care of the parentless children as best as they could with boundless love and a sense of duty.
In the Caribbean, we know our grandmothers have always been around to take care of their grandchildren as their adult sons and daughters go off to work or head off to the United States to earn a living, many of them working illegally for money, some of which is sent back home.
Grandmothers have always been a presence in the lives of their grandchildren when their parents, for one reason or the other, are absent and take little or no part in their upbringing.
Listening to the radio some months ago, I was struck by the emotions of a man who called into a talk show programme to give his response on the person who impacted his life the most.
The man sobbing into the telephone recalled growing up with his grandmother, now deceased and the love and care she gave him.
Having also had my paternal grandmother impacting on my own life in a very positive way and seeing grandmothers all around helping to take care of their grandchildren, I wonder why a symbolic day hasn’t been set aside to honour and appreciate them.
I think that’s a most worthwhile idea…next to a Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.
But now, grandmothers have evolved from a role of a simple care-giver to their grandchildren to becoming health care providers for their ill grandchildren afflicted with HIV and AIDS and holding whatever is left of the family together.
At last year’s 16th International AIDS conference in Toronto, grandmothers who have the responsibility of taking care of the orphaned grandchildren, many of them HIV positive were involved in the Grandmothers’ Gathering on the sidelines of the conference.
One grandmother from the African continent said it was no longer strange to see gray-haired elderly women carrying young babies – their grandchildren – on their backs  as though they had given birth to them.
The Grandmothers’ Gathering is part of the Grandmothers to Grandmothers Campaign organized by the Stephen Lewis Foundation, which provides funding to 140 community-based projects in 14 African countries.
It is chaired by former United Nations envoy to AIDS in Africa, Canadian Stephen Lewis, now currently co-director of AIDS Free World, a U.S.-based nongovernmental organization.
According to the Foundation’s web-site, grandmothers single-handedly care for millions of children orphaned by AIDS, sometimes as many as ten to fifteen in one household. 
“These magnificently courageous women bury their own children and then look after their orphan grandchildren, calling on astonishing reserves of love and emotional resilience. But they do so with almost no support,” it said.
Grandmothers Against Poverty and Aids (GAPA) started as a self help project in a low socio-economic area of Khayelitsha, outside Cape Town, South Africa in 2001 but has evolved into a voluntary organization managed by a committee of grandmothers to spread information and give support to other grandmothers.
Workshops are held each month for grandmothers where they learn about HIV infection and AIDS. Practical skills to overcome effects of the pandemic on households are taught. The workshops cover topics such as vegetable gardening, human rights, elder abuse, accessing social grants, drawing up a will and business skills.
As we observed World AIDS Day, my thoughts and prayers have been on grandmothers the world over, here too in the Caribbean as they deal daily with the brutal realities of AIDS.