“When I get back the results and I tell me mother, right away she give me a bowl, a cup and a spoon and tell me to keep it and I must use that all de time and nobody else must use it. I didn’t know really how to feel because you hear about HIV and people would say all kinda bad things, but I felt sad because she was my mother,” she told me.
She is 30 years old and a mother of four. She found out she was HIV positive while pregnant with her first child, at the age of 17. Since then, she has had three other children; two of the fathers of her children have died and it has been a rough journey. She volunteered to speak to me because, according to her, she wanted people to know there were people like her, who were “just trying to make it,” but for whom life has been difficult.
“My mother give me away when I was a baby. I is the big one and I don’t know if is because I get a disability [her left hand is partly paralysed and according to what she has been told she was given the wrong injection as a child and it affected her left side] but she give me to my grandmother,” she shared.
