Angola: Dolmingas dos Saleios Correia lives positively
Dolmingas dos Saleios Correia from Luanda district in Angola is HIV-positive and has lost her husband and two children to AIDS. She discovered her HIV status after her third child became very ill with chronic malaria and pneumonia. “The doctor removed my baby's oxygen supply and stopped the drip. This is how I found out that I was HIV positive.” Hundreds of thousands of people like Dolmingas can live a normal life if only the government and the international community support more health workers and services in public hospitals.
Dolmingas did not receive the care she needed during the birth of her second and third children and says she was let down by a weak health care system. “My second child was almost born on the floor. There were no beds in the maternity ward. I lay on this metal frame for two hours and was then asked to walk to another part of the hospital to give birth. I fainted”. “We have a lack of everything here. When I gave birth to my third child I was using the same bed as 3 or 4 other women, all of us bleeding onto the same sheets. Even the nurses were mixing the blood, using the same gloves to help us all,” she adds.Dolmingas believes her third son died needlessly: "If my baby had received better care he could have been saved. My son stayed in the public hospital for six months. He did manage to fight the pneumonia but it was me, not the nurses, who was looking after him and administering the medication each day. After six months I took him home but he never really got better ”“ three months later he died.”Dolmingas is now involved in the fight for better services. By telling her own tragic story Dolmingas is able to help others seek help. “I use my experience to encourage other women to protect themselves. That way my pain will not defeat me, it will be a victory for other women.”
Trained as an educator by Oxfam and our local partners, she has shown countless other men and women with HIV how to live positively and become activists in the fight against the disease. She is also living proof that anti-retrovirals (ARVs) can significantly improve the health of people with HIV.
Living positively
Her positive status enables Dolmingas to offer even more than information about testing and treatment ”“ she can also give people courage and determination. “Things are improving. ARVs are now freely available in syrup forms for children. However there are still many problems,” she says. According to Dolmingas, “Approximately 15,000 children are currently receiving ARV treatment in paediatric hospital in Luanda, but there are only two doctors. That's one doctor per 7,500 children. In public hospital, there are 10,000 adults on ARV treatment and only 10 doctors.”In 2004, Angola's Ministry of Health introduced free anti-retroviral drugs to treat HIV infection. The 30-year civil war in Angola limited population movement and protected citizens from the rapid rise in HIV and AIDS rates witnessed in many countries around the world. After the civil war ended in 2002, more open transport routes have encouraged people to move, consequently increasing the transmission of HIV in rural areas. Despite the fact that less than 5% of adults in Angola are infected by HIV (lower than in other Southern African countries), action must be taken now to prevent an epidemic. Hundreds of thousands of people like Dolmingas can live a normal life if only the government and the international community support more health workers and services in public hospitals.
