By: Solon and Thanks

I run a life skills club for girls at the rural school where I work in South Africa (a country which has an atrociously high rate of people infected with HIV), and for World AIDS Day this year we did some lessons on stigma and the kids wrote poems about HIV, which has certainly affected them all in some way. On one hand the stigma is really intense because even though something like 20-30 percent of women in some impoverished areas are infected, almost no one identifies themselves as HIV positive. I was discussing how many funerals we have here in the village with one of my colleagues, and he had this long list of reasons for it, none of which were AIDS... But in the shadows there's all this gossip from the adults about anyone who looses a lot of weight or is sickly. Anyway, on the other hand, I was encouraged by the passionate poems the kids wrote, and how willing they were to talk about the importance of safe sex and getting tested and not ostracising people who do have HIV. These are 6th and 7th graders incidentally. I think there are a lot of South African orgs and individuals who have done a great job getting conversations started. There even are (token...) HIV positive characters on popular TV shows like Generations and Sesame Takalani. Plus there are activists out there like David Patient, who has been HIV positive for 30 years and is so inspirational, talking about how the disease doesn't need to be the death sentence people see it as. An AIDS-Free Generation is a nice rallying goal, but I would just be thrilled if this generation of children can overcome stigma.