Elders Care for Families Torn by HIV

By Hong Thuy, VNS 

October 8, 2008 

Vietnam 

Seventy-three-year-old Nguyen Thi Mai (not her real name) smiles to hide her deep sadness.

"What can I do?" the 73-year-old woman replies to a question about whether her meagre income is enough to feed her HIV-positive son. 

"I earn VND25,000 (US$1.5) a day selling lottery tickets which isn’t enough to buy food" Mai says, "It is already hard enough to make ends meet, not mention affording medicines for my son."

Mai’s husband died early, leaving his wife and two children behind. Her daughter is serving a life sentence in prison. Life would be much more difficult for Mai if she could not share her pain with other peers at the empathy club for the elderly.

More importantly, the club lent her VND2 million ($121) to buy a heater for her grand-daughter to open a small hairdressing shop in 2006.

"The club encourages me to work for a living," Mai said, recalling how she had found nowhere to borrow VND20,000 when she was penniless. Her neighbours were too scared to talk with her and it was impossible to borrow money from them.

HelpAge International, a non-government organisation, knows the dire straits Mai and other old people like her face, especially those responsible for family members living with HIV/AIDS.

The organisation, in collaboration with the Viet Nam Women’s Union, has helped 1,394 old people in 67 empathy clubs borrow money to increase their income. There are approximately 3,300 club members in Ha Noi, Thai Nguyen, Nam Dinh and Quang Ninh.

Most of them have used the loans to open small business like outdoor rice stands. Many raise pigs and farm tiny plots of land.

Like Mai, many borrowers are elderly citizens whose children are living with HIV/AIDS and/or have to take care of orphaned grandchildren.

"The loan is small but it is a great encouragement to my family," Mai said. Thanks to the loan her granddaughter doesn’t have to spend her entire income buying medicines for her uncle.

However terrible her situation might be, Mai is one of the lucky ones.

According to the Viet Nam Association of the Elderly, many more elderly need to borrow money or their family members will die. But the existing regulations are a hurdle of red-tape barring the elderly from accessing credit loans.

"Most organisations refuse to provide loans to the elderly impacted by HIV/AIDS in Viet Nam, except the HelpAge International," said a senior official at the Viet Nam Women’s Union who asked not to be named.

According to the director of the Viet Nam Association of the Elderly’s Economic Affair Board, Le Van Nhan, the problem would be solved if the association was allowed to play its role as a guarantor for the elderly to borrow loans.

Under the existing regulations, only socio-political organisations like the Women’s Union, the Farmers’ Association, the War Veteran’s Association, and the Fatherland Front Committee have the credibility to guarantee loans without putting up collateral assets.

The Viet Nam Association of the Elderly is merely a social organisation, so it cannot play its role as a trustee, according to Social Policy Bank Director Ha Thi Hanh.

Hanh claims that the bank exists for the poor, and does not differentiate between old and young.

Yet according to Nhan, the elderly can only take out loans with the help of their children or other organisations. The Viet Nam Association of the Elderly, meanwhile, could help old people to both access credit loans and pay off the debts. If only they were granted the power.

Facts have shown that all elderly people borrowed money from the HelpAge International have been able to clear their debts.

There are about 8.3 million old people in the country. The number of elderly impacted by HIV/AIDS is not available as no survey about the issue has ever been conducted.

UNICEF and other international organisations place the number at 300,000. According to government statistics, Viet Nam has 129,715 people living with HIV, 26,840 people with full blown AIDS and a total of 39,664 people have lost their lives.

According to a survey by the Viet Nam Women’s Union last year, about 74 per cent of people living with HIV/AIDS who responded to the survey were being taken care of by their parents or grandparents, 68 per cent of them by their mothers and grandmothers.

Findings from another survey conducted by the Viet Nam Association of the Elderly among old people who had a HIV/AIDS victim in the family found that 82.6 per cent of these elderly had to care for between one to three family members.

While old people have affirmed the important role they play in caring for their children living with HIV/AIDS, the official policies do not take care of them, not mention support their affected children.

"They do not know what to do if we don’t provide them a fishing rod," Nhan says. 

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