Meeting Point Vanderbilt: Learning from Africa

With little or no money, groups of women in Ugandan villages devastated by AIDS are effectively using music, dance and drama to educate those most vulnerable to HIV and to improve the lives of those already infected. This kind of grassroots intervention has helped reduce the rate of HIV infection from 30 percent to 8 percent of the population even where efforts based on traditional Western medical models have proven largely unsuccessful.

Gregory Barz, assistant professor of ethnomusicology at the Blair School of Music and professor of religious music in the Divinity School, has recently focused his research on documenting and demonstrating the link between the decline in Uganda's HIV infection rate and the grassroots efforts of rural women's groups to de-stigmatize the social and religious barriers to prevention and treatment.

Can the same methods work to help those falling through the cracks in the United States? Based on Barz' field research, a coalition of faculty, staff, students and community partners are bringing Ugandan AIDS activist Noelina Namukisa to Vanderbilt for 10 days of events in April to inaugurate a cross-cultural dialogue on ways of approaching a globalized understanding of health care issues affecting us all.

Namukisa is the founder of a small non-governmental organization called Meeting Point located in the Namuwongo district of Kampala, the capital city of Uganda in East Africa. Meeting Point is a network of community outreach sites started in 1992 as a direct reaction to the fear many people faced in the 1980s regarding the stigma attached to HIV/AIDS.

Barz said Namukisa is evidence that "one person can make a difference. She is someone who has empowered herself to help others and effect social and economic change in her community, her country and now Nashville." In this interview, Barz asked Namukisa to discuss her work.

Barz: How did the name "Meeting Point" come about?

Namukisa: Our organization is called Meeting Point because this is the point where all problems, needs and issues can be addressed and met. This is the meeting point for people living with HIV in this area. Our women's group -- Kyamusa Obwongo -- was established in reaction to the ignorance of the people of this area. The majority of people living here, mostly women, are illiterate, so that phrase, "Kyamusa Obwongo," meaning "sharpen your brain," was adopted to encourage women to open their minds and allow them to be "sharpened." Before, everyone hid in shame. Now everybody comes out, and this is the point where everyone meets.

Barz: Meeting Point offers an integrated approach to HIV/AIDS, focusing not only on the immediate medical needs of an individual, but also on the social problems that accompany family members acting as caregivers as well as children who are often orphaned or abandoned. How did your organization develop this emphasis?

Namukisa: I believe that love cannot stop with the patient. You have to love the entire family. People in the past used to die miserably. You could find a person alone and desperate, lying in her own vomit. Nobody would care for her. Nobody would bathe her. Nobody would give her food. When we started visiting patients, caring for them in loving and compassionate ways, people would model us, and we began to see changes slowly occurring in the way families and friends would react to the disease.

Barz: Most of your outreach efforts target women and especially young girls. Why is that?

Namukisa: Women are at the center of much suffering throughout Africa. In Uganda, as in other parts of East Africa, women are responsible for the location and cooking of food, caring for children and for shouldering many of the social and economic burdens of maintaining a family unit. If women are not literate, the nation of Uganda will not develop. As for young girls, we know that they suffer a lot. We take care of girls whose parents die of AIDS and are left alone as heads of families. Maybe there are brothers and sisters that are very young, and often times the girl does not know what to do. These girls are often desperate, and many men take advantage of this desperation, offering to give young girls needed soap and sugar in exchange, of course, for sex. We invited the girls to Meeting Point, and we started a tailoring school to help them. Ninety girls went out last year and now they are working. What we want is a girl-child and a mother to have something to do on her own, rather than having to beg. We cannot leave out children, because a nation without children is not a nation.

Barz: Because many of the women and young girls who come to Meeting Point do not read and write, much information and education occurs within the contexts of music, dance and drama. Would you explain how these formats are used?

Namukisa: Not only do we communicate our messages primarily through music, dance and drama, but counseling on our site is also done through music and drama. When we organize a play or music, we don't just compose any song or meaningless drama. First we recognize the experiences and needs around us. If we pass along those experiences in drama, we find that we help people enormously. We can show a drama demonstrating how younger girls acquire HIV because they want to get rich, to become "smart" at an early age. We can show what happens when women go to witchdoctors instead of testing centers. We can pass along some songs in places where AIDS has hit aggressively. Music is our most powerful tool for effecting change in Uganda.

Barz: At Meeting Point, you use music for more than merely conveying information or offering instruction.

Namukisa: You know, music makes women happy. They feel at home when they sing, when they dance. They feel that even if they are sick they can "put on the music, put on the drums," and as you know, we can really dance. We have women walk in sick and then hours later dance, jumping high in the air, feeling a fresh breath of life. I feel that music -- singing, dancing, drumming -- is one of the best ways we have of maintaining our community of women and supporting them in their attempts to live positively with AIDS rather than merely being HIV positive.