TEAM KENYA

The three of us, Teja, Michelle and Diana are based on Mfangano Island, Kenya where we are collaborating with Family AIDS Care and Education Services (FACES). You can read about this organization and watch their documentary on their website, www.faces-kenya.org/

Our focus is to get a hotline running for fisher-folk in the region. FACES has asked us to work on this because the fisher-folk in Suba, which includes Mfangano Island, are a particularly vulnerable group of clients within FACES. This is in part because they are migrant and their schedules are highly volatile, making them subject to weather conditions and migration of fish within Lake Victoria. The nature of their work makes it difficult to keep up with Antiretroviral (ARV) treatment and clinic appointments and causes them to suffer from HIV complications. Secondly, there are jaboya, a subset of fishermen that solicits transactional sex from women in exchange for their high-value catch. This increases the incidence of HIV.

Chas Salmen who has spent much time with the communities on Mfangano and who will meet with us here on the island at some point provides an interesting perspective for understanding the epidemic in this region. In his thesis, “Towards an Anthropology of Organic Health,” he writes that HIV in the region “represents the dynamic intersection of microbes moving across time and space, a colonial history of marginalization, structural violence imposed by a global whitefish industry, local political structures of competition and rivalry, and the embodiment of desperate economic conditions.” His writing gives context to the HIV epidemic on Mfangano Island, demonstrating how, in his words, “powerful socioeconomic forces and deteriorating ecosystems contribute to illness as much as any pathogen.” In order to convey more context on HIV on Mfangano Island we will try to link the intro and first chapter of his thesis to this blog.

The goal of the fisherfolk hotline is to facilitate fisherfolk’s ability to pick up their medications in a timely fashion and keep their clinic appointments even when work takes them far from their usual clinic. Through the hotline clients will be able to find clinics close to where they are working, reschedule appointments, and arrange medication pick-ups at nearby clinics.

The following blog entry will better detail what tasks we have ahead of us.