By Leah Mwainyekule
Two years after James
Kanyawire’s daughter died after falling sick in 1999, James decided to take an
HIV test. The results were positive, but
he didn’t want to believe it. He looked
at himself in the mirror and thought that he was too healthy to be infected. He didn’t even bother to tell his wife or
take another test. He didn’t even
imagine that he could fall sick one day.
He didn’t even think that the virus could spread. Yes, he was living in denial.
Denial was what nearly
cost the lives of James and his beautiful wife Faggie. They had another daughter who suffered the
same fate as the first one, and they too fell sick at the same time. They were too sick to even take care of each
other, and slowly, they started realizing that living in denial will eventually
kill them. And it nearly did.
“We had reached a point
that both of us were too sick to do anything, and so my relatives had to come
and take me somewhere else, and my wife’s relatives also had to take her
somewhere else,” remembers James
When the Kanyawire’s
second child died in 2004, they decided to take a test and the result came out
positive for both husband and wife. This
time James believed the results and knew that their status was the reason for
their children’s premature deaths, but he was still hoping for a miracle.
“We were referred to the
Thyolo Hospital so that we could start treatment, but didn’t go. We still looked healthy by that time and I
was just hoping that some kind of miracle might happen and the virus might just
vanish,” he says. But after falling sick
badly to the extent of being taken care of by different relatives, the pair
decided to change.
“I had actually reached
the last stage of AIDS,” recalls James.
“I had wounds in my mouth and throat, my body was sour, my weight was
down, you couldn’t look at my skin and I couldn’t even walk. I was also coughing continuously.” According to the couple, the wife was even
worse than her husband. “I developed
skin cancer in my legs and my weight dropped to 28 kilograms,” says the wife,
Faggie, who now enjoys her weight of 52 kilograms. Her skin is also healed.
The worse thing is that
upon knowing their HIV status, the couple used to quarrel a lot, with the wife
accusing her husband of bringing the disease since he used to sleep elsewhere most
of the time and get back home drunk the next morning.
The Community Partnership
for Relief and Development (COPRED) organization, in Lilongwe, Malawi, helped
save the Kanyawire’s. When Faggie was
being taken care of by her relatives, a volunteer visited her and convinced her
to join a support group of people living with HIV. She had also started taking ARVs and was
receiving food supplements from COPRED.
Recovery was fast.
Upon sharing the good news
from his wife, James returned to Blantyre where he and his wife were both in
the same support group. He also started
the ARV treatment and found his body recovering pretty fast, and in one month. However, life wasn’t easy for the Kanyawire’s.
“I had stopped working
when I felt sick and we had even sold our house items to get money for
treatment, so we were actually starting from scratch,” says James, who used to
be a hotelier. “We started depending on
charity from religious institutions and COPRED itself.”
That was 2008. Luckily for them, the pair was selected to go
for a counseling training, and that was when James started working as a
volunteer for the Chilomoni Health Centre, while his wife was stationed at the
Soche health Centre. In mid 2009,
COPRED employed James as an HIV Counselor and Tester, a position he enjoys
until now.
James speaks of his job so
fondly, expressing how he loves it because he knows that those infected will
get better, even though they are suffering, as he is a living example of that. “It’s as if God was waiting for me to start
suffering so that he could give me this job and help save others,” he says.
The couple is planning on
having a child one day, and they’re just waiting for Faggie’s CD4 count to be
strong enough so that they could start producing. “We only want one child, and we know that we
will always be with that child,” says James.
The Kanyawire’s are now
born-again Christians who want to help other people help themselves. They know that if they had kept on living in
denial, they would have already been history by now. They have only one advice for everybody out
there: “Denying your HIV status is like signing your own death certificate.”
Yes, James and Faggie definitely don’t have plans of signing theirs.
(Leah visited
Malawi in December 2010 under a program implemented by Pact Malawi)
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