Mrs Ibiyemi Fakande

Mrs Ìbíyemi Fakande is the founder and Executive Director of Living Hope Care Society, a Non Governmental Organization, which for more that twenty years has been the sole source of support for people in the area infected and affected by HIV/AIDS.

Fakande is by all accounts an unlikely saviour. Sitting in the office she tells of how she was born in 1952 to a low class
Christian family she was one of fifteen children. In a common example of how
polygamy contributes to poverty in many Nigerian families her building
contractor father supported four wives and to make ends meet Fakande was forced to sell goods on the street in a common practice known as "hawking"
from the time she was seven years old. With just a primary school education she married at the age of fifteen. She was tragically widowed just three years
later when her husband was killed in a road accident. A single parent to three
young children at the age of 18, it would appear as though a natural choice
would be for her to marry again. In spite of pressures from those around her she refused, a move highly unusual for a woman in her society particularly at that time. She went back to school with the help of her elder sister and by the age of 24 she was in a Secondary School class with teenagers.

"I always looked young so nobody would have known" she says. "It was difficult because of my children but I knew that I wanted to go to school."

When she completed secondary school Fakande continued her studies
to go on to train as a nurse. Her nursing career was still in its infancy in
the mid 1980s when she first came across the emerging pandemic, which would soon ravage her country, HIV/AIDS.

"When I finished my nursing training, I was working in a hospital when on a faithful day, a very ill man came in and the doctor said they didn't have the drugs to help him. 'What is wrong with him?' I asked. They told me he
 had AIDS" she recalls.

At the time, the life prolonging abilities on anti-retroviral drugs were light years away. People with HIV/AIDS were identifiable by their emaciated frames and faces covered in shadows. Stigma against them, albeit still persistent was then at its peak. In the hospitals they were told that nothing could be done for them. Not content with the premise that living with HIV/AIDS were veritable lost causes Fakande took it upon herself to treat them using traditional remedies often allowing them to stay in her own home. She lights up as she recalls using cashew nuts for a young lady with enduring oral thrush.

"The sores on her mouth started to go. It worked, you could see the change and it made a difference".

She began to visit the homes of people with HIV/AIDS and found a great satisfaction in seeing some of her remedies alleviating some of the pain
and discomfort that they were enduring. She used natural herbal remedies such as bitter kola, honey, aloe vera, saint leaves and black soap to reduce any type of infection that they might contract. She became known in the community as the nurse who looked after people with HIV/AIDS and soon she began giving talks. She faced hostility from her colleagues in the hospital who were sending HIV patients away for her insistence in treating them.

"I talked to other health workers in  bit but they didn't want to listen to me neither did they want to learn about HIV." She says.

Undeterred, for the next several years, she researched and experimented with alternative medicines and nutritional supplements to build up her knowledge. She qualified as a public health officer in 1991 specializing in
sexually transmitted diseases. By 1994, she had shaped her research, experience, and observations into a effective and inexpensive methods of treatment. In the same year, Ibiyemi attended a European Union-funded training program on caring for HIV/AIDS patients. This was the motivation she needed to set up Living Hope Care to pursue the work on a full-time basis and the organization began to
specialize in home-based care. Since that time, Living Hope Care has acted like a small plaster on the top of an erupting volcano. They are the sole
organization in Osun State, which has a population of four million people
working on HIV/AIDS. By Nigerian standards the HIV prevalence in the area is very low at 2% (Benway State by comparison has a 24% positively rate) but enormous challenges fuelled by grave poverty and inaction by policymakers remain.

The role of foreign volunteers in Fakande's operation is significant. As evidenced by her home, which is peppered with Irish trinkets such as fridge magnets and picture books, twelve Irish people have spent time
working for Living Hope Care since 2006 as part of programmes offered by a
Cork-based NGO, EIL Intercultural Learning. Most notably two homes for children orphanaged and made vulnerable by HIV/AIDS were set up and funded by Irish volunteers.

The role these volunteers played are really incredible, their works are saving lives here and really appreciate them she says.

The organization which is staffed by many who have a personal connection to HIV/AIDS or who are themselves HIV positive works by identifying and educating target groups such as female sex workers. In the Nigerian
context, HIV is mostly spread through heterosexual sex thus female sex workers are the most high risk group for HIV and they are a colossal source of the virus being spread. Barefaced poverty is the fuel for Nigeria's sex industry.
The country's unemployment rate is officially set at 20% but this figure, like
most data supplied by the often corrupt government is massively disputed and understood to be around half of the real figure. Thus, the cycle of HIV is invigorated by a situation where by a massively young population (the life expectancy in Nigeria is 47 years-old) is without work, thus young women are drawn into sex work to support themselves and have little chance of alternative employment. Young men who are idle are enticed to use sex workers who are relatively inexpensive.

In Ireland and in the Western World there are no babies born with
HIV. The correct medical treatment is available and mother to child transmission is unheard of. A persisting battle for Fakande and her organization is that Nigeria's maternity centres don’t have access to the drugs
needed as they are not provided by the government. Just 7% of the Nigerian
women who need it are getting antiretroviral treatment to prevent mother to child transmission and 220,000 of the country's children are living with HIV.
When a HIV positive pregnant woman is registered with Living Hope Care,
Fakande's organization will bring her out of the state to receive the drugs she needs during her pregnancy. They will then keep the drugs until the baby is delivered, as they must be stored in a fridge, a luxury item most of the
mothers are unlikely to have access to. When the baby is born, Fakande is
notified and there is a rush for her or one of her staff to administer the vital drugs, as the sooner the child is given them the less likely it is for them to become HIV positive.

The face of HIV/AIDS has changed dramatically in time that Fakande
has been working in the area. Whereas once her organization was so heavily stigmatized that they had to move premises twelve times because of intimidation tactics, today people are not against our work. Additionally, antiretroviral treatment becoming available free of charge since 2002 as are result of a policy implemented by the Nigerian government in conjunction with the American funded PEPFAR (the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), has had a remarkably improved the welfare of those living with HIV and allowed them to live relatively Norman lives.