As residents of Wynberg East gathered at a community meeting at the end of September calling for the TB HIV Care’s Step Up programme to cease its operations in the area by the end of October (“Residents seek solutions” People’s Post, 10 October), Step Up’s activity was investigated further to gain a fair understanding of the matter.
Step Up is a programme dedicated to handing out sterile injecting equipment in TB HIV Care’s mission to help prevent blood-borne diseases, especially among those struggling with addiction and living on the streets in Wynberg.
Speaking on behalf of TB HIV Care in considering the community’s qualms, Alison Best argues Step Up does not just hand out sterile injecting equipment to help prevent disease, but also offers a comprehensive package of services aligned with the National Strategic Plan for HIV, TB and Sexually Transmitted Infections 2023-2028 and delivered through the support of key partners.
According to the local councillor for Ward 63 Carmen Siebritz, Step Up operates on a Provincial Health Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).
“These include services which support people who wish to change their drug use such as opioid substitution therapy and psychosocial support, as well as HIV counselling and testing, behavioural interventions and the collection and safe disposal of used injecting equipment,” Best explains.
TB HIV Care’s advocacy officer Bronwyn Gantana says their clients are issued with clean needles during weekly sessions on Tuesdays and Thursdays, whereby their clients are screened and their used needles are collected and properly disposed of. That is when four clients typically go out as pickers to seek and collect discarded needles, in addition to “GeoCentric who collaborate on daily clean-ups during the week,” Gantana says.
Step Up clients speak up
Now a Step Up peer educator for five years, 37-year-old Nikita van Vuuren has lived on the streets since 2013. “If it wasn’t for Step Up, I would probably have been dead already,” she believes.
“I was a client for five years until I got onto Step Up’s Methadone Programme that changed my life.” Once again a productive citizen, Van Vuuren is proud to announce her recent lease on a flat in Woodstock, now living a peaceful life with her two cats, Jellybean and Lappie.
“If Step Up were not here anymore, our clients would suffer. A lot of them could even die. I believe it’s really important we keep delivering our service and I wish that the community could maybe get more involved, volunteer and really understand what it is we do.”
Agreeing to speak under anonymity out of fear of harassment, at least five Step Up clients living on the streets added: “I’m a heroin addict. For me to travel to town where their head office is based and benefit from their services – I can’t do that. That would mean using old needles, sharing needles and at the end of the day, I could get HIV. It helps us a lot. There are lots of people living with HIV on the street, and Step Up helps us monitor our status thanks to regular testing,” shared a woman in her 40s.
Another man (46) living at Step Up’s pop-up station in Brisbane Street said if Step Up was to leave Wynberg “then we’d be doing things we shouldn’t do like sharing needles . . . we’d be lost.”
Two women wearing work bibs and holding litter picks, shared: “We volunteer to go to the drug use hotspots to pick up any needles to be disposed of. The community makes assumptions about Step Up, thinking that they encourage us to use drugs. But the fact is, they support us to change far more than the community does,” a client of five years said.
The other woman argued that “what we wish from the community is respect, just like they wish to be respected. We know there are some of us on the streets acting like hooligans. Sadly, but most of us return respect shown to us.”
They allege being terrorised in the evenings by vigilante residents wishing them gone where they set up camp to be taken down the next morning. “We get physically attacked and pepper sprayed,” one added.
When speaking to a Wynberg police officer on condition of anonymity, he says official cases of assaults on said street dwellers have not been reported. He adds “It’s crucial for cases to be reported if investigation into such matters is to be done”.
Remaining impartial to whether Step Up should remain in or leave the community, the officer alluded to problems stemming from the lack of control or monitoring of needles once they have been distributed. “We’ve seen instances where needles are stolen from Step Up clients by street thugs, which then get sold for money,” he says.
Best concludes that Step Up’s absence in Wynberg will not guarantee the absence of issues raised.
“The most effective way to work towards a safer, healthier community in Wynberg is through working in partnership. Removing a service delivery project like Step Up will not decrease drug use, homelessness or antisocial behaviour. In fact, in the absence of services, these issues are only likely to increase.”
