Thank you for helping Alem get life-saving care.

Hello,

We hope you are well and safe during this time. 

Thanks to the generous donations of the public and private donors such as yourself, Alem is doing well. She is receiving regular dialysis at a private facility and her health is improving daily. Chronic dialysis will however not resolve the threat to her life – only a transplant can do that.  As Alem is not a South African citizen or a permanent resident of South Africa she requires Ministerial authorization for transplantation.  However, the Minister of Health refused to grant Alem authorization resulting in her legal team at Lawyers for Human Rights working to challenge the Minister’s decision.  Should this legal challenge be successful, Alem may be added to the waiting list for a kidney transplant and access state-funded dialysis.  Alem's status as an asylum seeker should not mean a death sentence in South Africa. 

Lawyers for Human Rights are further working to launch a Constitutional challenge of the impugned laws and policies that exclude Alem, and people like her, from state-funded dialysis and transplants without the need to apply for Ministerial authorization. Despite the outbreak of COVID-19 and a national lockdown in South Africa, Alem has continued to access dialysis in the private sector and her legal team have managed to continue pursuing her legal challenge. But, dialysis is expensive and court procedures can take a very long time. Please continue to donate so that we can keep Alem alive until she can have her day in court. 

From Alem and her team at Lawyers for Human Rights, we cannot say thank you enough for your support. 

Keep up the good work.