First-hand: promoting treatment adherence for young people

Raeesah Yusuf, community care worker, from Freedom Park, South Africa. Here, she shares her experiences working with young people with HIV. Working with the youth is actually interesting for me because I work with different age groups. I understand how they are affected by their status. So how they then cope. How they live, how their daily life, how the routine goes. Then the HIV, how do they cope with friends, partners and all of that actually. So it becomes a little bit more interesting to actually interact with them, understand them more because we look at our youth and then we judge them by actually not knowing or understanding why they do certain things, why they behave in certain ways. me being a mentor to them helps me understand them more. It helps me communicate with them more, and then we actually have our, your friendships with them, I befriend most of them so that it becomes easier for them to communicate with me, to talk to me, to open up to me as well.

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