14/03/10

I met a fellow volunteer for lunch the other day and she told the following harrowing story. She has been here for a year already and is very close friends with her maid. (Background: having a maid here is very normal and even expected of anyone who has any sort of income.) She and her maid had gotten some weird rash, but while she had recovered pretty quickly, the medicine was not helping her maid and her rash had gotten so bad that her legs were completely covered and she was in so much pain that she couldn’t walk. My friend went to her house with another health volunteer to try to figure out if they could do anything. The health volunteer asked to see her doctor’s records. She asked the maid if she knew what medicine she was on and the maid said yes, I’ve been on such and such for a couple years, it’s for high blood pressure. “No…” the health volunteer said “it’s anti-retroviral…it’s for HIV/AIDS.” She didn’t know she had HIV/AIDS. She had gotten tested in 2006 and tested positive, but whoever had given her this piece of paper and her medicine had failed miserably in explaining what it meant. And so she has been HIV positive since at least 2006 and had absolutely no idea.