ONE of the original aims of the Mustard Seed Communities (MSC) was to provide room and board for abandoned children who are HIV positive. However, over the years, this objective has shifted to helping these children become functional members of society, MSC Jamaica Executive Director Darcy Tulloch-Williams recently told the Jamaica Observer.

“When we started back in 1996, between 1996 and 1998… we were thinking that we were only providing room and board because they were all going to die, because they must die,” Tulloch-Williams shared. “They are on a very good regiment of medication as well as nutritional programme that is boosting their immune system, so they are living.

“So there are guys we have had from like age three, they are now 18, looking at okay ‘what am I going to do’,” said an elated Tulloch-Williams, who disclosed that MSC has not lost a child to the virus in at least the last 10 years.

The medication regiment Tulloch-Williams spoke of costs the Mustard Seed Communities approximately $1 million monthly to care for the 65 HIV-positive children they house. Some of the children, Tulloch-Williams explained, have even become resistant to their medication because they have been living with the condition for so long. These children are then given another medication regiment.

“I know there is one particular young man who we are paying close to US$500 a month for his medication alone,” the executive director revealed.

The children within the MSC are those who have been abandoned because of the stigma attached to the disease. Tulloch-Williams said the children include those who were born with the condition through mother-to-child transmission and those who were abused and got HIV from their abusers.

Explaining that MSC sees itself as a change agent in society, Tulloch-Williams said once a need has been identified, the community jumps in to assist. From serving mentally and physically challenged children, who have been abandoned, to teenaged mothers and now abandoned children with HIV, MSC is constantly looking to serve and uplift the most vulnerable members of society, especially disabled and abandoned children.

The dynamics of caring for children living with HIV change as the children get older. It becomes more difficult, Tulloch-Williams disclosed.

“It’s no longer the little cute ‘hello how you sweet, baby’, but it is now dealing with a child that is in crisis because he is a teenager, in crisis because of having the virus, in crisis because they are in denial too, many of them will tell you they don’t have it,” Tulloch-Williams told the Sunday Observer.

MSC also has to place emphasis on remedial work since, to some extent, their ability to be socialised and educated is also affected. She also said that the fact that they have become institutionalised is also taken into consideration.

“So what we have started to do now is educate them, put them in vocational training to get them to where they can become functional, independent individuals who can now go out in the society and contribute,” Tulloch-Williams declared.