TASO – The AIDS SUPPORT ORGANISATION

TASO, an indigenous HIV/AIDS organisation was founded in 1987 by Noerine Kaleeba and 15 other colleagues – some of whom have since died of AIDS related illnesses. It was based on people unified by common experiences faced when encountering HIV/AIDS at a time of high stigma, ignorance and discrimination. (Information from the TASO website).

In 1989, I had gone to work in the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea in London, UK, appointed as a specialist social worker for adults – primarily gay men, living with HIV/AIDS. At that time, there was an extraordinary degree of ignorance and discrimination both at a Governmental, public level and at a personal level. AIDS was considered a ‘gay plague’ and there was constant vilification of the community in national newspapers and from the Church, and fear within public services such as hospitals, social services providing home support and amongst funeral directors.

It was largely as a result of that generalised fear and ignorance that the gay community itself organised and established specialist services both within hospitals and the wider community, and was ultimately at the forefront of breaking down stigma when it was finally recognised a few years on that HIV did not discriminate on grounds of sexual orientation. It was after all a virus which could affect gay and straight people alike.

When I resigned from RBK&C in 1992 over the decimation of the specialist service I had been part of setting up for all residents living with or directly affected by HIV/AIDS, I was appointed to the London Borough of Newham as an HIV specialist social worker for adults. In Newham at that time there was a sizeable community of Ugandan refugees living with HIV/AIDS.

My own professional history led me to Uganda first in 1995 and I have been returning on a regular basis ever since: as soon as I learned of its programs TASO seemed to be the project that I wanted to contribute to.

Through a variety of programs TASO contributes to preventing HIV infection, restores hope and improves the quality of life of persons, families and communities affected by HIV infection and disease. It does this through individual and group counselling; through care which provides early diagnosis and treatment of opportunistic infections and importantly it enhances the chance of living positively and dying with dignity. (Extracts from the TASO website)

My personal experience of working with TASO has been to marvel at the consistently high calibre of staff intervention and encouragement of ordinary men and women living with HIV/AIDS – empowering them to live until they die. In 2007 I was privileged to work with TASO staff in the design of a training manual for working with adolescents affected/infected with HIV, encouraging the development of peer support groups run by the youth themselves.

While facilitating a residential workshop for representatives of TASO branches from across the whole of Uganda I was able to spend much time addressing gender inequality which continues to be one of the drivers of the HIV pandemic in Uganda, with an urgently expressed need by the organisation to focus on that issue.

I have delivered direct training to communities on HIV/AIDS awareness, the impact of gender inequality on the spread of HIV infection in Africa and solutions to lessen that impact.

It was from gender training undertaken at the request of Denis Omiat in his village, Ojama in Serere area in 2007, that some young men requested training to enable them to undertake some of the tasks normally associated with women.

A cooking project for youth was successfully set up – run by a core group of five women who designed and ran a six week cookery course for 30 young men of Ojama village.

(Background: The kitchen building constructed for the cookery course)

The course covered basic information on nutrition, purchasing food from the market and encompassed practical tasks that women of the village carry out every day. Fetching water in jerry cans from the well, boiling it to make it safe for drinking; preparing local foods and occasionally supplementing the diet with fish or meat; cooking and serving the food while not neglecting the washing of hands before the meal. Finally, clearing the dishes when everyone has eaten and washing and drying the plates, pots and any crockery used.

That might sound simple!

In Uganda, as in many African societies, it is unheard of for males to perform the above tasks but by breaking down such a gender barrier it is possible to get whole communities to rethink their core value systems and to make choices about how they might change the relationship between men and women.

In the last couple of years of worldwide recession, TASO has seen substantial amounts of its funding withdrawn and has had to re-evaluate some of the ways in which it had been supporting communities living with AIDS. There are some 21 support groups established by the Organisation. The groups are a social network for people of particular localities who are living positively. However, an increasingly important activity of the support groups has been assisting the members to establish sustainable income generating projects. Past funding had enabled TASO to be generous with start up grants to these groups but this money has now largely dried up and the groups have had to become self focussed and self sustaining from the beginning.

Toward the end of my 2010 stay in Uganda I was invited to provide some training to representatives of the 21 support groups. It was suggested to me by one of the TASO coordinators that many of the groups are lacking skills in business management – including record keeping; marketing skills, basic book-keeping and any notion of succession planning.

Once more, I felt my professional skills were going to be stretched laterally if I was to provide something useful in these areas! However, enjoying a challenge, I decided that I would employ my social work skills, my diverse experience, my counselling skills and build on those I currently employ in my professional work as a team leader/middle manager of a project assisting frail aged in Sydney.

Together with a friend and colleague, Rosette Iteko - a Ugandan woman highly qualified in areas of governance and international development - we developed a two day training program that focussed on SWOT analysis, marketing, recording/accounting and accessing funding.

Pictured Above: Some of the 21 support group representatives gathered for the workshop

Pictured Above: No meeting in Uganda is complete without music and dancing!

My good friend Edith proved most adept at this...

While the training was valuable, there was too much material to cover in such a short time and I have undertaken to write a training manual for TASO based on the content covered in the workshop and that their staff will be able to use across the groups they are working with.

TASO annual report for 2008 lists impressive statistics across all its activities – to list a few:

TASO service centres registered 21,270 new clients

Counselled 65,822 individual clients

Provided medical care to 88,274 individual clients

TASO supported 3,015 children in formal education

With funding from different development partners, today TASO has grown into one of the biggest indigenous AIDS service Organizations in Sub-Saharan Africa, having cared for a cumulative number of over 300,000 individuals and their families since its inception. Through its 11 service centers across the country, TASO has now given Anti-retroviral Therapy to over 30,000 people living with HIV/AIDS out of over 100,000 active clients. Since its inception, TASO has trained about twenty-five thousand individuals and organizations in HIV/AIDS management around the world.

For this level of service delivery and to allow for expansion, particularly in the area of development of sustainable income generating projects TASO will depend on increased financial support and reliance on volunteers like myself who work with them for short periods of time.