An empathetic devotion to counselling and care of people living with HIV/AIDS…Philomena Percival is a ‘Special Person’

Jun 08, 2014 News

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“Many (AIDS victims) were shunned as their condition worsened; they were neglected by their families and we (a team of volunteers) were the only support some of them had; talking with patients, counselling them, encouraging them…”

By Dennis A. Nichols

Florence Nightingale and Mother Teresa were two names that popped into my mind as I listened to Philomena Percival,

and others who know her, talk about the remarkable work she has been doing in Guyana with persons suffering from Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) over the past 20 years. And while this week’s ‘Special Person’ may still have some way to go before a valid comparison can be made with those two outstanding women, such a parallel has some merit, based on the kind of care, compassion and commitment Mrs. Percival has put into her work which, for the better part of two decades, has been a voluntary undertaking.
Starting in 1993, this mother of five, a committed Christian, has comforted, counselled and cared for hundreds of patients, many of them struggling through the agonizing final stage of a disease precipitated by a virus unlike any the world had heard of at the time.
Trained ‘just’ as a Health Care Provider, she has nevertheless touched the hearts and lives of persons living with, and dying from, AIDS, some of whom relatives had turned their backs on, and almost all of whom had to endure the anguish of society’s alienation and stigmatization as much as, if not more than, the disease itself.
Philomena Kathleen Percival was born at Vryheid, a village on the Demerara River, several miles from Georgetown, but relocated with her family to Plaisance shortly before her father, Anthony Dias, a cattle rancher of Portuguese extraction, passed away in 1966. With a touch of humour, she enlightened me with the knowledge that Plaisance was known in the 1960’s as ‘Putagee Village’ due to the number of Portuguese people living there. She attended St. John’s Roman Catholic School, before moving on to Sacred Heart School in Georgetown.
She recalls that after leaving school, it seemed as if there weren’t many job options open to young women then; it was usually Nursing, Hairdressing or Sewing. She chose Sewing/Dressmaking. However at the time she was living with an aunt who was a nurse, and she thinks that’s when she first started developing an interest in the nursing profession.

Following a strike by nurses in 1975, she began assisting her aunt with simple nursing chores at the Woodlands Hospital. But a few years later, hospital chores became housewife routine after she married Lambert Percival in 1979, while still a teenager. The marriage lasted for 34 years, until her husband’s death in 2013, and was blessed with five children (Four boys and a girl).
It was in 2004 that Mrs. Percival first got involved with persons living with ‘the virus’. It began with a meeting facilitated by the Full Gospel Church, of which she is a member, where one Brother Southwick, an English dentist affiliated with the UK-based AIDS Care, Education and Training (ACET) organization, spearheaded a training programme dealing with HIV patient care. She was in the first batch of students.
Shortly after that initial training, the Christian Church launched its response to the epidemic by establishing a Community Based Organization, the Guyana Association for AIDS Training Education and Care (GAATEC). Mrs. Percival noted that this was done even before there was a national Home Care Programme in place. She received further training there, but continued working as a volunteer, and eventually got certified in Home Based Care Training after completing a course at the Institute of Distance and Continuing Education, (IDCE) University of Guyana in 2005. She also benefitted from the work done locally by the US-sponsored Guyana HIV/AIDS Reduction and Prevention (GHARP) Project.

 

OVERWHELMED WITH COMPASSION

Speaking with me at her Lamaha Street home recently, she said her first real interaction with HIV patients came in 1994 when, as a GAATEC volunteer, she went to help out at the Genito-urinary Medicine (GUM) Clinic at the Georgetown hospital which, among other things, diagnosed sexual transmitted diseases including AIDS.
At that time she was working closely with social worker/counsellor, Dereck Springer, in the area of counselling, and remembers vividly the first time she felt overwhelmed with compassion for a man who had just received the news that he had tested positive for HIV.
“He started crying, and I remember he suddenly stopped, and I reached out to him. I went over and hugged this guy and told him that it was okay to cry. He cried and cried, then when he got it off his chest, he stopped. I saw Dereck watching me, then he said to me in a voice that sounded harsh at first, and I was scared. He said, ‘Philomena, if you continue like this’… then he paused, and added, ‘you’re going to go a far way working in HIV.’ I thought he was going to rebuke me, but I guess he saw something in me then that I didn’t even see in myself.” Mrs. Percival opined.
That was the first of many such encounters as she continued working in the GUM Clinic, and later in the hospital wards where she assisted doctors who were looking after AIDS patients. She helped with simple tasks, one of which, she laughingly recalls, was to help ‘interpret’ for two foreign doctors, what the patients were saying in Creolese or Guyanese parlance. Apart from that, she said, it was a deadly serious undertaking.
She gleaned invaluable knowledge and experience in the day-to-day care of the patients who were more or less isolated at the back of the old Medical Block, where they were pining away, their bodies emaciated and ravaged by the disease.

 

NEGLECTED

“At that time there were no anti-retroviral drugs to treat persons who contracted the virus; patients were treated for the symptoms of the other diseases brought on because of a compromised immune system, and by then it was obvious that most of them would die. Many were shunned as their condition worsened; they were neglected by their families and we (a team of volunteers) were the only support some of them had; talking with patients, counselling them, encouraging them, and I was never afraid to touch. I knew that I could not contract the virus like that; I really learnt a lot from working with those doctors on the ward,” she professed, adding that for most AIDS victims, this abandonment by their families came at a time when they were in most need of their love and understanding.
She continued working at the Georgetown Hospital as a GAATEC volunteer for several years, but also got involved in private home care as well as AIDS education, which entailed travelling to several rural parts of the country including Bartica, the Essequibo Coast and Berbice. She participated in seminars and Home Care workshops aimed at sensitizing the public about AIDS, and educating patients about the disease, partly in order to lessen the repulsion and stigmatization associated with it.
This aspect of her work also included visiting and educating persons about the epidemic in other churches and in security guard services. She was also the voice behind the radio programme, Facts for Life, a five-minute discourse on HIV and other health-related topics between 1988 and 1999. Later she started working with G+, a network of Guyanese living with HIV and AIDS, and it was the first time she was not working as a volunteer, but getting paid for her services

 

EMPATHETIC PERSONALITY
Everywhere she went people warmed to her empathetic personality and humility. Her generosity was not limited to the giving of her time, skill and energy; it also included a more tangible form – giving items such as food and clothing to patients who were desperately in need of them.
This aspect of her freehandedness included ‘stealing’ from her children, she admitted with a chuckle, as she wasn’t a wealthy person. Later, her church, The South Road Full Gospel, assisted with donations and items such as toiletries. As a result of this kind of interaction, critically-ill patients as well as their families drew close to her to the point where she says, she actually ‘had the honour’ of witnessing the final moments, and death, of some patients, after which their families found it hard to let her go.

This led to her going through the bereavement period with some families until she decided it was time to let go. “You know,” she added, “there comes a time when you have to make that break. You have to tell yourself, ‘It’s only one of me; I can’t give more to this family.  My job here is finished.’ I go through that bereavement period with them, and when I think they should be off on their own, then it’s time for me to move and try to help somebody else.”
Nevertheless, based on such experiences, she said she would like to set up a Bereavement Counselling Group soon to help grieving relatives come to terms with the death of their loved ones.

 

COMMITMENTS
Apart from the training and the workshops in which she participated locally, Mrs. Percival’s commitment to her work led to her participation in an AIDS Conference in France in 1999, where she met and interfaced with medical personnel, counsellors and international AIDS activists including former Zambian President, Kenneth Kaunda, a notable international figure in the fight against the disease, and who had lost a child to the pandemic in the 1980’s.
Her participation at that conference was made possible by sponsorship from PANCAP, The Pan Caribbean Partnership against HIV/AIDS, of which Guyana is a member. (Dereck Springer is now the PANCAP Director) At that conference, she remembers, accessing funds and medication for patients were ‘brought to the table’.
Commenting next on her religious commitments, Mrs. Percival noted that it is a very big part of her life. She is a deaconess and also the Head Usher at The South Road Full Gospel Church, and says her church work is intimately connected with her AIDS/Home care work.
With respect to this she observed that, “There is a great difference between being a Christian and being a believer in Christ. As a believer, God gives you that extra something; He gives you a more compassionate heart, and love for people, and I am a people person.” She added that her church supports her work with HIV, and as noted earlier, assists with donations to this end.

SHIFTED THE FOCUS
Over the past few years Mrs. Percival has shifted the focus of her work to general home care, although, according to her, this does not exclude interaction with AIDS patients. She noted that people still call her at home seeking counsel, and using her as a directory when they want to get information on some AIDS-related matter or to draw on her home care experience. She said that although she gets paid only for the work she does in home care, she still gets gratification from helping and counselling AIDS patients, even over the phone.
With her combination of empathy, warmth, and the human touch, Philomena Percival has, without fanfare or fame, carved her own little niche of commiseration in a world bludgeoned by the harsh reality of AIDS and other traumatic diseases. And she has done so with quiet dedication and Christian devotion to a cause, which would undoubtedly have made both Florence Nightingale and Mother Teresa proud.

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