Mutinta Muchimba (Not her real name) is a 23-year-old resident of Dambwa South in Livingstone, Southern Province of Zambia. She is an ambitious lady dreaming of becoming a soldier. In 2019, while she was still in high school, she enrolled and participated in a three-year TB research project conducted by a local NGO from 2019-2021, where she first tested for TB and was found to be negative.

Six months after participating in the research, in May 2022, Mutinta began to show signs and symptoms of TB. Using the GeneXpert machine, she tested positive, and this worried her as she did not understand how she got the disease.

 “It was a difficult time for me to accept the results, and I was also concerned about what my friends at school would say. The biggest challenge was absconding from school for two weeks after I had started taking my medication,” she said.

Mutinta was immediately put on treatment and enrolled in the Telemed program, where she underwent intensive counselling to help cope with her situation. She was also given a phone to communicate with the facility regarding her TB treatment.

“Despite taking the counselling classes, I was still struggling to understand how I got the disease. After two weeks of taking TB medication, I started receiving phone calls from the Telemed team, and I would not answer them,” she stated.

To ensure that Mutinta was adhering to treatment, the team visited her home to share knowledge on TB treatment and management with the whole family.

Mutinta said that it was during this visit that she finally accepted her TB diagnosis. She stated that with her family’s support, she completed the treatment after six months and fully recovered and managed to write her grade 12 examinations. She is now waiting for an opportunity to enrol into military training, a dream she has had since childhood.

“The journey was not easy initially, but with all the support I received from the Telemed team, it became better every month”.

Mutinta is one of the 970 people who, in 2022, benefited from CIDRZ’s Proud-Z Telemed programme implemented at five sites in Lusaka and Livingstone and supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).