She goes from door to door spreading the message

KASARAGOD: At the age of 27, Awabi learned two new words: HIV and AIDS. When everyone thought her life ended with the death of her husband who gave her the disease, she started her life. Today, conservative Kasaragod is familiar with two burqa-clad women, Awabi and Thahira, going from house to house identifying and counselling HIV positive women in the locality.

“It was the disease that took me outside my home. Now, I have an aim and a message for the young girls. We identify HIV positive women and motivate them to go on with their lives. We create awareness among the victims, their relatives and neighbours, who used to shun HIV positive people until recently,” Awabi said.

She found a solace in Institute of Applied Dermatology (IAD), an NGO, which organised HIV positive women. “Most often, when an AIDS patient dies, even relatives refuse to do the funeral rites.We go to the family where the death occurred and help them wash the body. There were occasions when we had to manage the entire rituals by ourselves,” she said.

She is the convener of IAD Plus, a community of positive women, mostly widows, which mobilises resources for the victims in need. “These women are doing a marvellous job. They provide a communication link to the large group of victims hidden from the public eye. They give them courage. They even raise resources to support the fraternity,” IAD administrator KS Bose said.

If her life is a message, her hope rests on her two children, who were tested negative. “I live for my children. I want to do many things for society, but I am afraid when I think of all the unwanted publicity my children get. People still look at positive people with suspicion and isolate them,” said the 31-year-old woman.

Awabi’s life is a tragedy scripted by a conservative patriarchal society. The tragedy of a 16-year-old girl married off to an old man. On her first night, she discovered that her husband was sick and he had another wife with kids. After surviving ten years of lovelessness and bearing two children, she was told she had AIDS. When her husband died of the disease in 2002, she was sent to a hospital where she was tested positive.

The first wife of her husband had succumbed to the virus earlier.  “I had never heard of AIDS. I even tried to commit suicide. Then doctors and counsellors at IAD said there were many like me. Then I wanted to live my life,” she reminisced. Awabi withstood opposition from her mother and brothers to join the volunteers fighting the spread of AIDS.

She discovered a large group of positive women who had never ventured out of their houses while their husbands toured the big cities of north for trade and pleasure.

Nizam Rawther, a health service officer who wrote a soon-to-be-published book on Awabi, said: “It takes immense courage for a woman to declare she is HIV-infected, defying all limitations set out by a conservative community. Commercial sex workers are no longer a high-risk group, thanks to our campaigns. But it is difficult to identify victims in the general public. They quietly carry on spreading the virus.”