adminSharon Kavhu Features Writer
IT was her judgment day. She stood in the dock, looking sorry, visibly shaken and expectant. Her mind darted here and there, straddling the thin line between freedom and incarceration.
She wore a pair of black jeans and a flowery blue, pink and green blouse that matched with navy blue pumps.
The magistrate sat in the chair, calm, composed and seemingly untouched by everything.
Her heart beat fast as a guilty conscience haunted her.
She regretted everything.
While her mind still wondered, the magistrate sat up and the prosecutor bellowed: “Silence in court!”
She was sentenced to an effective three months in jail.
Overzealous as usual, the prison officers grabbed and whisked Gumisai Bonzo (36) away to start her new life at Chikurubi Female Prison.
Gumisai said this was to mark the beginning of an unpleasant stint behinds bars, and what an experience she says.
“When I arrived at the prison with two officers behind me, there were prison guards at the gate who ordered me to change my clothes into the prison garb.
“Under their instructions I had to leave all my belongings at the gate including my antiretrovirals.
“I tried to explain to them how much I needed my medication but my pleas fell on deaf ears.
“The atmosphere that these guards created was so tense that I got scared to reiterate the issue of my medication,” she explains.
She was on first line regiment of ART, she took Zidovudine, Lamuvidin and Nevarapin twice a day, at 8am and 8pm.
“I skipped my medication on the night of my arrival and also the next morning as we were going through the registration process, where the health personnel at the prison took notes of my personal life to initiate me on the prisons ART programme.
“When I was initiated on the prison ART programme, I was being given a different ART combination and I ended up reacting.
“A few weeks before I was imprisoned, I had been diagnosed and operated on my back, therefore, I was still taking some medication for my wounds to heal,” she says.
Lack of adherence in taking ARVs is one of the major causes of inefficiency of the medication (drug resistant) and severe side effects.
Well, as for Gumisai, she lacked adherence to medication and to make her situation worse, she switched her drug combination without the approval of a health expert or a medical examination.
Normally when an ART is switched to a new drug combination, it is either due to a drug resistant in the drug combination that he or she will be taking or due to side effects.
Mrs Bonzo was imprisoned for buying stolen cattle, worth US$650 and serving the meat to customers at her restaurant.
People usually understand prisons to be merely buildings where people of a delinquent nature go to for rehabilitation or are legally committed to while awaiting trial.
However, for the rehabilitated Gumisai, who is living with the HIV and Aids, prison has a deeper and more tragic meaning to her.
When Mrs Bonzo narrated her trauma she told The Herald that her three months in jail last year felt like three years as she suffered and was left with emotional, physical and spiritual scars that are set to live with her for the rest of her life.
Her first day in cell with other inmates was not bad because they were interacting with her. Things started changing on the fourth day when these inmates saw her receiving the ART at the prison’s clinic.
“I am not ashamed of my HIV status. I am even free to talk about it, but when I told my fellow inmates about my status, they started discriminating against me.
She said during that time, there was a serious water problem, such that inmates would fetch water a distance from the cells and the toilets smelt real bad.
They used buckets to flush because the toilet system was down and the pipes were very old, considering that Chikurubi was the first female prison to be established countrywide.
This, among other things, says Mrs Bonzo affected her very much and her health deteriorated even further.
People who are on ART require a balanced diet and they should eat frequently. However, in prison all inmates receive the same kind of food regardless of their special dietary requirements.
Mrs Bonzo said: “My CD4 count declined sharply, I lost a lot of weight and my skin was burnt especially the face as I developed huge blisters.”
During the day she would do all other activities together with her fellow inmates, they would go work in the fields six hours a day and have their supper around 4.00pm before they received their ART.
“I lost my appetite because of the food that we were given and thus I stopped eating which worsened my condition,” she added.
Sometimes bad things happen to people for good reason.
Mrs Bonzo’s bad experience in the prison motivated her in forming her own group of Aids activist to assist other victims called Zimbabwe Mighty Women of Hope.
The toilet system at the prison are dilapidated, the pipes are very old that they sometimes use the bucket system.
However, the national public relations officer, Mrs Elizabeth Banda, said Government and other partners will soon rehabilitate the pipes through the Water Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) programme.
Although diet remains a major problem to the inmates on ART, their drugs are always available.
Online Reporter