This wonderful photo was taken at Mahila Milan 2008, PRASAD Chikitsa’s program for the Self Help Groups (SHGs) in honor of International Women’s Day. Read more
One Child's Story
Editor’s Note: No words or statistics can adequately capture the experience of children grieving for dying or dead parents, stigmatized by society through association with HIV/AIDS, and struggling without services and support systems in impoverished communities. We share with you this story of one child among the 100 HIV-infected children PRASAD is treating in their program right now.
In September of this year, the PRASAD Chikitsa HIV/AIDS program staff heard of a very sick child who was living in a beggars’ house in Ganeshpuri. They found her emaciated, swollen, unkempt and very anemic. They brought her to the Family Health Center, where they washed and fed her and dressed her in clean clothes. An X-ray showed that her right lung was half full of fluid; she had an advanced stage of TB. They tested her for HIV and she tested HIV positive. Slowly, they were able to get her story out.
The girl had been living in Mumbai, and both her parents had died. Her aunt put her on a bus and told her to “go to the place of the hot springs.” She had been abandoned – something the PRASAD staff has seen several times before, but never in the case of a 10-year-old child. The staff felt sure they could help this child medically, but where would she live? She had no one, no family to take care of her, and PRASAD does not have an orphanage or children’s hospital or other such facilities where she could go.
One of the first things PRASAD did was to register the case with the police, so that authorities would know of the girl’s abandoned status and whereabouts. The staff then found a safe house for her to stay in at night, and during the day, she stayed with the staff at the PRASAD Chikitsa Family Health Center. It was important for the staff to keep a close eye on the girl to ensure that the TB medicine was taken as prescribed. Slowly, she began recovering, thanks to good nutrition and the love and care of the FHC staff. She now is at an orphanage about an hour’s drive from Ganeshpuri, where the PRASAD staff can visit her to see how she is doing.
More and more HIV-infected orphans like this young girl will be forced out onto the streets as the disease continues to spread, a scenario that already has multiplied hundreds of thousands of times in many African countries. Before the AIDS epidemic, about two percent of children in African countries were orphaned. Now the rates are more than ten percent.
How can we prevent this from being the future for HIV-affected children in the Tansa Valley? There are no easy answers, but PRASAD’s HIV/AIDS Program is an important ray of hope in the region. We are committed to finding solutions that will enable children like the girl in this story to have a safe and nurturing place to be.