AIDS In Maharashtra Villages

[Guest guest]

EXCLUSIVE: DANCE OF DEATH

12 June 2006

EXCLUSIVE: As Aids ravages India, we talk to those who live and die

in its shadow

Anton Antonowicz In Maharashtra, India

ARCHENA is 13 years old. Her mother is dead, her father is long

gone. She lives with her grandmother and aunt in a mud-grey house

set apart from the rest of her village and yearns to be a teacher.

But her relatives won't hear of it. They are Kolati and the Kolati

tribe don't teach. They dance. Their women don't marry - but they

have sex. Often.

In bygone days, they were courtly entertainers and the heralds of

princes, travelling from village to village, putting on elegant

dance spectacles.

That was long ago. They still travel, but today the Kolati are

treated as little more than itinerant sex-workers, accused of

spreading disease as they go.

And here in Maharashtra - a state of 100 million people in a country

of more than one billion - the most feared disease is Aids.

Officially there are an estimated 5.1 million people with HIV in

India, making it the world's second highest caseload after South

Africa. But the true figure is certainly higher.

" This number is the tip of the iceberg, " says Dr SM Waghmare, civil

surgeon at the government hospital in Latur, a teeming city 250

miles east of the state capital, Mumbai.

Health care centres which test pregnant women for HIV show an

overall infection rate of 1.5 to two per cent. That suggests 15 to

20 million are infected across the subcontinent.

Maharashtra is one of the worst-hit states. About 60 per cent of the

sex workers in the capital and 40 per cent of the intravenous drug

users are infected.

" We're sitting on a volcano, " says Gopi Menon, Unicef area

spokesman. " Aids has infiltrated homes across the state and the

consequences for children are dramatic.

" You have grandparents and grandchildren living alone together. Sons

and daughters, the parents, have disappeared. "

In this climate of despair, children mature quickly.

" It is difficult because I am a Kolati, but I want to make my future

different, " Archena says. She is small for her age, like all the

children here. Her eyes have a cotton-wool clouding betraying

Vitamin A deficiency. It is classic, long-term malnutrition and

common in villages like this.

Equally common are young widows like Ashab Prabel Landge who, at 26,

has three children and lost her husband two years ago.

Her husband was a contractor, rich by local standards. A prime catch

for Ashab's family.

" My father said I should marry him, so I had no choice. He did not

seem the kind of man who had disease. Then, suddenly, he did not

want to work' a few months later he was dead.

" Now all four sons in his family are dead. All from Aids

But Ashab counts her blessings. She is not HIV-positive. " I don't

know how I and my children avoided it... my husband knew he had the

disease before he married me. " I ask her father what he thought when

his son-in-law stopped working and began to lose weight. " Nothing. I

have no right to question my wife's husband, " he says.

Custom prevents it. Just as there is no right for girls to say no to

their father's choice of grooms. Tradition prevents it. And it is

tradition that still promises those who are infected with Aids that

sleeping with a virgin will cure them.

It is an ignorance that schoolteacher Sayed Ayub has spent years

trying to wipe away. " Everything about the disease was stigma. When

someone died, the villagers would not touch them. They used wooden

poles to take the body to the funeral pyre.

" I was sick myself and the private practitioner said he wasn't

prepared to touch me until I'd had an HIV-test. That's the level of

ignorance. In this village alone I'd say the HIV rate is 30 per

cent. "

One of those dying is Droupadi Kadam, aged 23. She was married at 15

and even then worried that Satish, her intended, looked ill.

" There was no glow to his face, " she says. " He had a greyness. I

thought maybe he has HIV. He was a truck driver and we know that

truckers spread the disease. But my dad insisted.

" Satish became more and more ill. We had a daughter. She was sickly

and died when she was four years old. By then Satish was already

dead. "

She begins to cry. " A year after we married I found his medical

record showing he was HIV-positive. It was dated before our wedding.

I was crazy with worry, but could do nothing. He was my husband. I

couldn't refuse him sex.

" He gave me a daughter who died young. And he gave me the disease

too. "

Astonishingly, even in this fiercely patriarchal society, Droupadi

was not told she was infected. Instead, the doctors told her

father. " My dad was given the results, not me. He said I was fine.

It was only after my daughter died that I discovered the truth.

People don't talk about these things. What Dad says, goes.

" So I stay at home and read religious books and prepare for what

will happen to me. Only my family knows of my status. I prefer it

that way. "

She may believe her secret is safe, but it is not, of course, the

case.

Many know her husband died of Aids and they have accepted it. And

they accept the inevitability of Droupadi's own infection.

Their growing acceptance is testament to a Unicef programme which

has brought Aids education to the remote villages of Maharastra.

Young volunteers begin the programme, slowly drawing the whole

village into the initiative. Young teaching old.

Populations are counted, villages mapped for the first time, gender

breakdown noted and priorities - like ensuring clean water - are

drawn up. And then the villagers are taught about Aids.

It is astonishing how quickly centuries of tradition can be broken

down.

Fatehpur, a village of 1,600 people, is an example. Some 200 people

crowd into the temple-cum-village-hall. Both sexes, all ages.

They talk proudly about what they now know about Aids and how self-

respect and respect for others can help combat it.

But such respect only goes so far.

We travel to a hospital specialising in preventing mother-to-child

transmission of the virus.

Untreated, a baby born to an HIV-positive mother has a one-in-three

chance of contracting the disease.

Preventive practise in the UK, for example, has meant less than one

per cent of children become infected. Sundera Bhai has just given

birth to a son.

She has not had time yet to give him a name, but it certainly won't

be that of her husband who infected her with HIV before dying.

Sundera has scraped together a few rupees for the first anti-

retroviral drugs for the baby. And, as a result, her nameless son '

now has a 70 per cent chance of growing up HIV-free.

We find her doctor, Pradeep Ugile, at his new 20-bed clinic in Latur

town. He explains his plans to triple the size of the clinic, to

make it a centre of excellence for the treatment of HIV/Aids in

India.

Among current patients lying in those 20-beds are a hotel worker, a

trucker, a farmer, a local politician, a volleyball champion, and a

building contractor. There are three housewives and two babies.

They are all suffering from TB which flourishes among Aids

sufferers.

BUT it is the children to which our attention is inevitably drawn.

Six months ago the Daily Mirror with Unicef launched a worldwide

campaign on behalf of the millions of kids growing up alone -or

never growing up at all - due to HIV.

Our campaign - highlighting the Aids orphans of Kenya, the epidemic

raging in Ukraine, Europe's worst-hit nation and now, its effects on

India - means fighting the problems which fuel the epidemic.

It means overcoming stigma, discrimination and sexual inequality. It

means dealing with the vast number of orphans, with schools and

hospitals stripped of staff and economies robbed of workers. Huge

problems, but not insurmountable ... There is hope, perhaps in the

smiles of little Archena as she bows, ignoring her grandmother's

suggestion that she dances in the dust for us.

She would rather be a teacher. Far better that than a life dancing

with death.

I knew he had Aids but I cannot refuse my husband sex

THE AIDS FACTJTLE

40.3 million people are estimated to be living with HIV worldwide.

Sub-Saharan Africa is the worst affected region - it has 25.8million

with HIV.

65,000 people in the UK are thought to have HIV - a third are

undiagnosed

The number of HIV cases in the UK is rising. In 2000 there were

3,851 positive tests - by 2004 it was 7,275

Only 30 per cent of new HIV diagnoses in the UK were gay and

bisexual men.

Since the disease appeared 25 years ago, HIV/Aids has killed 16,049

people in the UK

In Europe, the East is most badly affected, accounting for 70 per

cent of new diagnoses in 2004

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