No resentment

15/02/2013

Over the last few days I have been going out to various parts of the community in Awassa with my counterpart, Teddy, and various counsellors from OSSA.

Our task is to meet current beneficiaries of OSSA and discuss their stories, with the aim to create case stories for a selection of them which will then go to HQ to help raise more funding from donors.

I will introduce you to the people I have met so far in future blog posts, but I thought I should comment on the common theme I am seeing so far.

All the people we have seen are women, usually in their 40s. They are all widows, their husbands beaten by HIV. In fact, one woman I met has lost two husbands to HIV. The common theme here is that the women all contracted HIV from their husbands, who at the time did not know they had HIV. As their husbands didn’t get tested, they went without medication and subsequently died from the disease. These women then choose to get tested after losing their partners, only to discover they are HIV positive, and now take ART medication. Taking this medication prolongs their lives considerably, some living over 10 years longer than their husbands.

How are their husbands contracting the disease? They don’t seem to know, there are many conclusions you can jump to but no concrete evidence. All I can think is how resentful I would be if my husband infected me with HIV, especially if he knew he had it and did not tell me. These women do not seem fazed that their husbands have done this, and now left them to suffer a difficult life and bring up children on their own.

What I find even more interesting is that many of them have not had their children tested, meaning they could potentially outlive their children purely from the fact they are taking ART meds for their ailment and the children have not been checked.

The questions I find myself asking is why are these men being so careless about their behaviour, and essentially what they leave behind is devastating. The women do not seem to be resentful of their situation; many accept it as a norm which is even more heart breaking.

Even in the organisation we are working with, their focus about HIV transmission is for young girls, to prevent them transferring to their children, but I cannot help but feel the main perpetrators are the men who do not disclose their status, maybe because they do not know it, maybe because they do not think it is necessary to. I find it sickening they would not disclose this to their wives particularly but also to any of their sexual partners. In the UK, and much of Europe, knowing you are HIV positive and knowingly infecting other people is a criminal offence, which often brings prison time in the case of conviction. Why is the attitude here so blasé when Ethiopia has the highest HIV rate in Africa?

So many questions, will we ever know the answers?

Kx