As a Kenyan woman and a woman living with AIDS, I treasure the leadership, expertise and wisdom of you to bring this prayer forum.
My presence here is not so much on expertise but more an indication and a symbolic of strides of healing and reconciliation that have taken place in the last couple of years. And for that I am grateful.
My only strength here is in fact also captured in my identity; that I am a woman, and a woman with AIDS. I have spent nineteen years living with the AIDS virus and all my time is committed to giving hope to those who have also been found by the virus no matter how helpless and hopeless sometimes it may look.
Some of what I have learnt on the road to AIDS is painful; stigma and discrimination are brutal and universal. Hypocrisy mars every level of government response to AIDS by pandering stigma and moral judgemetalism or rather playing the deaf to critical issues affecting lives of those who are HIV-infected.
Our leaders who are also power brokers can respond more readily to international declarations and commitments more than they will respond to the orphaned child’s cry at home.
I recognize that as people living with AIDS – PLWAs – we are branded by others more than we define ourselves. We are not seasoned fighters who know how to battle societal judgments.
When our leaders, preachers, teachers, etc tell us that AIDS is a dirty illness belonging to dirty people, we don’t want to be identified as infected.
We fear our families’ rejection and our communities’ isolation. Our fears keep us from being tested, stigmatization block us from seeking treatment and ultimately condemn us to a slow, painful and inevitable death.
What we, PLWAs, need most and most urgently is the redemption of our status as human beings, we need leaders to champion our cause until we gather enough courage and strength to champion it ourselves. We are desperate for leadership that will define us as human beings, valued and worth no matter our HIV status.
We are ordinary people in need of extraordinary leadership. We need leadership that will influence workplace policies and insurance policies and other practices that discriminate us day in day out. Leadership that will put policies in place that will protect our rights as human beings. We are not asking for extra favours. We don’t ask for special treatments or special considerations.
We need the voice of the Minister, the Bishop, the priest, and the MP; voices that we have not heard in the past, we are now increasingly desperate to hear passionate senior policy voice demanding AIDS to be a priority, and a priority now.
We need leaders to shake off the aura of “victims” as if we are feeble and passive objects. We want you to become powerful ambassadors for compassion and healing. We need your leadership to campaign for our dignity as much as crusade for interventions. It is dignity that inspires our courage and emboldens our self-esteem.
Dignity raises our faces that were lowered in shame. Dignity straightens our backs when they have been broken by stigma. And dignity strengthens our character when we have been assaulted.
Your language matters. It can be used to lift us or to demean us and break us. It you leaders tell us that we are dirty – we feel unworthy. If you tell us that we are societal problems, we feel guilty. If you tell us we are fallen, evil, useless, then we have ability to be people at all. The language of our leaders defines us in ways we cannot define ourselves.
Until you people of stature and leadership step up to lead this, as people living with HIV and AIDS, we will struggle and stammer with issues of powerlessness and futility.
But you can reason: “me I don’t even comment on people living with AIDS” as you do. Believe me you have, because silence is as potent as speech. If you have the power to lift us up and heal us but say nothing about us, we know by your silence that we are not worthy. Silence as well as speech can build our hope or break our will; lead us to service to bring us to suicide.
I am trying to calculate the impact we would make if the leaders in this room, we committed ourselves to embrace service instead of denial; to nurture and care for others including one another rather than seeking refuge in undeserved silence. Believe me; we could equip an army of compassion and healing whose ambition would be war against stigma, discrimination, ignorance and illness. We have the capacity to do this; we have the knowledge; we have the power and we have the influence if only we will use it.
And in the end, we people living with AIDS, we shall remember not the stigma and discriminating practices from the enemy but the deafening silence of our leaders.
Thank you ladies and gentlemen and may you all have a great day.
