In most of my childhood memories, there’s always been a single story about how to acquire HIV – promiscuous sex. Yet when I signed up to become a Global Health Corps fellow, i had no idea how, within a matter of months, this story would be changed.
With a University degree, its ample to say I know better. Needles, blades, transfusions, and lesions all offer some channel for the virus to roam into the human body. But at the GHC Training Institute at Yale, I came to see 2 men – 2 gay men – 2 gay men from the San Francisco Bay Area – 2 world stereotypes about HIV.
Coming from Uganda, I carried with me, perhaps subconsciously, the hostility of the Ugandan law and the “touch-thee-not” of my christian upbringing. As I dared to humble myself to listen to these 2 men, I realized that I didn’t see gay, I saw life. They had partners, family, who they lost – just like I lost my dad and mom! They lived in a community – the Bay Area, the early 90’s archetype of infection, disease and death – I live in Uganda – the late 90’s beacon of how to nip a nation’s tragedy. They were black – as I – and the notion of so much similarity to them made made me sick to my stomach. Sick because it was discomfortingly true, sick because it was breaking my walls, one by one, walls i didn’t know existed.
To prepare for my interview, I went online to read about Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation and her story changed me. Infected with HIV, as early as the 1981, before I was even born, this mother watched in desperation and despair, as she passed on the virus to her daughter. Now, to think of this happening to Samara and Gabriella – my own daughters, makes my heart break. Yet millions of mothers continue to pass on the virus to their children.
Each day, 900 children worldwide become infected with HIV (UNAIDS 2012), 90 percent of whom contract the virus through mother-to-child transmission. Without diagnosis and treatment, one-third of infected infants will die before the age of one, and nearly one-half before their second birthday.
But we know the heart of a mother, every mother (and father) would like the best for their child. Every child deserves the best in life, and the best starts with what is fair and just. We know the specific heart of a mother because we have the Pediatric AIDS Foundation, that was renamed after a mother who did not sit around, but believed she could do something. She went on to do it.
Elizabeth Glaser was a woman of uncommon bravery and conviction. She was a mother fighting on behalf of her children, who believed that actions not words are what save lives. Inspired by her determination, today we are helping to provide mothers with the knowledge and resources they need to keep themselves alive and their babies HIV-free.
I will spend the next 12 months supporting the efforts of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation in Uganda. I will make the world more aware of the need to bring an end to mother-to-child HIV transmission and I will try to convince you and the rest of the world to be a part of a mother’s fight.