BAGCUGCUTELI NEED MORE RESOURCES

Sir,

Being a health motivator (umgcugcuteli) is a daunting task in Eswatini rural areas because you do not get enough support from government. You feel like you are on your own, fighting diseases without tools.  Government only pays us a stipend just enough to buy bread, yet ours is a full time job.

Efforts

We are paid E350 per month, yet without our efforts, the health systems would collapse. We deal with difficult cases where the youth commit backstreet abortions, requiring us to intervene and save them from imminent deaths in the night. At that time, all clinics are closed and people do not have transport to take the sick to hospitals, in the cities. Sometimes people who do not know how we work tend to think we give palliative care to patients. They abandon their sick relatives and hope that we will visit them everyday to bathe them.  With the shortages in drugs and medical supplies in clinics, we are given very limited pain killers, if any, and sometimes run short of gloves and bandages.  During the COVID-19 pandemic, most of bagcugcuteli died because they were forced to go to the front lines and assisted people who had been infected.

Hated

We could not shy away from them in fear of being labelled as segregating against patients. We worked without sanitisers and personal protective equipment, most of the time. Then when we had to identify people to benefit from the cash-based incentives, we were hated by the people, who accused us of corruption.   Sometimes we have to use our family resources to help people in desperate situations. Usually, they do not have enough money to go and visit the doctor, we have to give them bus fare. At other times, they do not have food needed to take medication. We have to bring food from our families to save the situation.

Increase

All we are asking from government is that they increase our allowance, to at least, E800 and further make sure that all necessary personal protection equipment and first aid medical supplies are available. We also need to regularly take short courses to be able to identify some of the new diseases, such as the Mpox. It is very possible that we have long exposed ourselves to Mpox because of lack of education. We also need the number of bagcugcuteli to be increased, because we are in charge of a large population, which makes our work difficult.
We ask the Ministry of Health to look for partners to assist with the workload, otherwise, we will have less capacity and end up drawing the salary, but not working.

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