People like Linda Hlahatsi are doing their best to support those with TB and HIV
The Hlahatsi household has grown accustomed to the knocks and friendly greetings that start at 5.30am every weekday morning at their humble home in Tambo Village, near Gugulethu.
‘When I hear that call at 5.30 am: ‘Sisi!’ then I know,’ says Linda Hlahatsi, a huge smile covering her round face.
She lowers her bulky frame onto the couch in the front room of her house in Oliver Tambo Street and perches a white first aid box with a red cross on her lap.
‘Ja, the patients come at all times of the day and night with all kinds of problems. The other day a patient came and he was drunk and my husband scolded him, telling him he must respect our privacy and that he would also like to have some time with his wife,’ laughs Hlahatsi.
Hlahatsi has been a community healthworker at the Heideveld Clinic for the past five years, ensuring that her patients take their anti-tuberculosis and antiretroviral drugs.
She is currently training to become a staff nurse, paying the course fees out of her own pocket and doing her practical training at GF Jooste Hospital.
At the same time, Hlahatsi is also caring for six people who live in her neighbourhood, some on TB treatment and others on antiretrovirals.
‘The people come here in the mornings or in the evenings, depending on when they work,’ explains Hlahatsi, handing a saucer with two oblong orange tablets and a tiny white tablet to her TB patient, Beauty Brown.
‘Since I have been doing this community work, people have been calling me ‘Sister’. So I thought I must now become a real sister. In the end I want those maroon epaulettes.’
Hlahatsi grew up in a house where her aunt was always busy with community work.
‘I remember her taking us on weekends to clean the graves or going around to businesses to collect food parcels to hand out,’ she recalls, lifting her white floppy sunhat to wipe the sweat from her forehead.
‘Later my aunt became incapacitated by arthritis and I had to care for her so I left school in standard nine.’
In 1992, her second child still in nappies and Hlahatsi and her husband both unemployed, the young mother went back to school and completed her matric in Langa.
‘Life was terrible. We lived in a small room which we shared with my in-laws.’
Hlahatsi enrolled for several courses at St Johns Ambulance, where she experienced her first taste of medicine and caring for sick people.
‘I thought then that I was one day going to go into nursing.’
But it was when when Hlahatsi took her neighbour’s critically ill HIV positive daughter to the local clinic that she took the first step on the road to become a nurse.
‘They gave her tablets and she vomited. All the nurses ran away and I just took a plastic bag and started cleaning up. This is when the one nurse noticed me and saw my potential. She asked me to become a TB treatment supporter and I did the training.’
She believes that nurses must give of themselves to be good at the job. ‘You can’t be a nurse if you can’t empathise. You must be able to put yourself in your patients’ shoes. It’s about love,’ she says.
When one of her HIV patients’ shack recently burnt down, Hlahatsi offered a shelter to the young woman and her boyfriend for over two months.
Hlahatsi goes quiet when asked about dealing with death. ‘Yuh, before ARVs people were dying. Even on this block four people died. The denial was killing them.
‘There was this lady who was HIV positive and she made me strong. I watched her gasping, but we could do nothing and she died. Now I am not afraid anymore. I’m taking them like they are sleeping.’
Tears well up in Hlahatsi’s eyes: ‘I had to tell my daughter that there will be no Christmas outfit this year. I am a student and I don’t have an income, but you know I believe easy come, easy go. If your life is not easy you will manage and I know that I need to do this.’
Hlahatsi has a recurring dream where she is able to fly. ‘I fly over the houses and I often wondered what it meant, but now I know. My mind can fly and I can go up in life. Nothing in life is impossible, what I dream I can do.’
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