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Nairobi, KENYA - Life is made up of moments, moments that are valued for the memories that they evoke. But for some people in this world, life is not a rosary of smooth, prayer beads and their future is not a garland of precious moments. For them it is merely the sound of time passing, a clock ticking away.
Aamena
JiwajiWhen HIV/AIDS first hit the global scene there was a period of denial, followed by disbelief at the havoc it could wreak. Soon after a worldwide campaign preaching hope was started. Faces on TV, on billboards, pasted on lamp posts all carrying the same message. HIV/AIDS was not a death sentence. You could live with AIDS.
But as the spread of AIDS continued unabated, turning into a pandemic of immense proportions, claiming more lives and leaving more countries destroyed in its wake, the focus of attention changed.
It moved to prevention and the ABC steps: Abstain, Be Faithful and Condomise. Countries like Uganda, that were on the verge of losing nearly all its working population and becoming a country of AIDS orphans, experienced great success with this campaign. The number of people living with HIV in the country fell from 15% of the population in n 1992 to 6% in 2002 (avert.org).
Uganda was cited as an international success story and the government's commitment to combating the spread of the disease lauded. But, a few years on, discrepancies in the statistics suggest that their victory against AIDS may not have been as resounding as previously communicated with no real change in sexual patterns having occurred.
Statistics have been thrown around for more than two decades now: 30 %of South African deaths are AIDS related (avert.org).
But snapping fingers and alerting people as to the number of HIV related deaths every few seconds won't have the effect required anymore. The world already knows that the deaths are occurring. It is the human stories and faces that play the bigger role now.
The AIDS story is a tragedy of immense proportions. According to a BBC report, people that are seriously ill with AIDS in South Africa are entitled to a disability grant, a grant which in some households represents 50% of the total household income "putting the sick person in a perverse situation of being the family's biggest breadwinner. However, as soon as someone begins to take antiretroviral medicines and gets better, this disability allowance stops because the individual is deemed capable of work again. In some instances, this has lead to people remaining ill and refusing to take ARVs so they can continue to support their family."
Africa, as a continent and as a people, has been hardest hit by HIV/AIDS because of a number of factors: poverty, lack of education and ignorance, cultural barriers, human rights issues. Sadly, the groups that are most susceptible to contraction and hardest hit are those of women and children.
"HIV/AIDS has exposed the social inequities that make girls and women more likely to become infected, but women need more than rights in order to protect themselves. They need to know that they have such rights, that they can act in their own self-interest and that they will be supported by their communities and governments" -- United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)
Equipped with the proper information and education, women's groups would be able to learn how to avoid the HIV infection.
Cultural practices within such communities enhance women's exposure to the virus, practices such as early and forced marriages; female genital mutilation (FGM) or the cut; widow cleansing (a traditional practice in which widows are expected to have sexual relations, often with a relative of their late husband, in order to secure property within the family - UNFPA); wife inheritance (a traditional practice where the widow of a man is inherited by his brother upon his death); issues that are closely tied to the human rights of women and children.
In the absence of proper information about HIV/AIDS, the wrong decisions are being made. "In South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, the value of early marriage is being debated. In many developing countries, it is common to marry young people, especially girls, at an early age. But with the threat of HIV, many parents are marrying their daughters still younger in the mistaken belief that this might protect them from infection. Since the men who are financially able to marry are generally older and more sexually experienced, many are unwittingly bringing HIV and STIs to the marriage" (UNFPA).
"Worldwide, 82 million girls, generally from poor families, will marry before their 18th birthday, and will be more likely to become infected than their peers who are not married" (UNFPA).
FGM, or the cut, is a practice in traditional communities that marks the coming of age for a girl. It is a ritual that symbolizes her arrival into womanhood and which binds her to the generations of women before. However, in most cultures, it is still an unsanitary practice which risks infection, scars the inductee for life both physically and mentally and puts her at risk of contracting HIV/AIDS. But due to the stigma that continues to be attached to those who chose to forego the ritual, FGM continues to be widely practiced despite its dangers.
The threatened loss of property that a woman could incur if she refused to submit is another element that allows the continuation of traditional practices that endanger the human rights of the women involved.
The refusal to submit to practices such as widow cleansing has resulted in many women in sub-Saharan Africa ending up "homeless or living in slums, begging for food and water, unable to afford health care or school fees for their children, and at grave risk of sexual abuse or exploitation" (UNFPA). It is a cultural mind set and a customary practice that needs to be broken. Easier said than done.
"As one widow states 'We felt humiliated, but there was nothing we could do to resist, because we wanted to be clean in the land of the headman'" and so the first step to any policy should be tackling these cultural practices that force women and children to undergo such human rights abuses.
Poverty within African countries compounds the lack of education and information that is a core requirement if the fight against AIDS is to have any success. Only by eradicating ignorance about the disease, informing people about its mode of transmission and prevention can any success be achieved. But poverty also affects the treatment stage of HIV/AIDS since it limits the provision of drugs and medical care to HIV/AIDS patients. Kenya, for example, only recently began providing anti-retroviral therapy to its people and then only when donor funding was secured.
If human rights is the first area of impact by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, then the second is development. African hospital wards are filled with HIV/AIDS victims. And so Kenya has entered a new stage in its HIV/AIDS campaign by targeting the youth, the future of the nation, through the "Tume Chill" campaign, meaning "I have abstained," which popularizes the choice not to be sexually active.
National campaigns to create awareness amongst the public and to influence sexual practices of the youth are only the tip of the problem in African communities where entrenched cultural practices are the root cause for the spread of HIV/AIDS.
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