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Beatrice is a former commercial sex worker in Remera suburb of Kigali city. She is only twenty five years old but appears fifty. “I almost died,” she says with tears in her eyes “I was so sick and afraid to go for testing as I knew my lifestyle” she adds tears pouring down her face. “I then gathered courage and went to the nearest testing centre. As I had suspected, I was not only infected by HIV but, I had another two opportunistic diseases.” “I was hanging with a very thin string between life and death.”
Beatrice is one among many women who are infected with HIV and are too scared to go for testing. Most of these women are young and illiterate or semi illiterate whose major source of income in this increasingly competitive and expensive city is prostitution. Most of these women ended up in the city looking for employment. With no education or any other survival skills they turn to prostitution to make a living and majority of them have ended up being infected with HIV at a very tender age.
Beatrice came to the city ten years ago to work as a house-maid, she soon fell out with her employers and was kicked out of her job. Faced with the prospects of returning to her home village empty handed, she opted for life as a twilight girl. A year later she was pregnant; in addition to her needs she had a child to feed with an absentee faceless father. Life was hard, according to her she had to return to the night life by the roadside before month was over. Ten years in the business, she hangs to dear life struggling with a disease that has no known cure; her only hope is in her being able to get access to the government’s anti-retroviral therapy through local clinics.
Recently, Beatrice together with other former commercial sex workers came together in an association and are being supported by an association of Christian women and a local church. The support ranges from skill training to material support to sustain them economically. Mid this year, the Christian women association approached LWF/WS Rwanda through its HIV/AIDS intervention, seeking support for Beatrice and her friends. The LWF/WS Rwanda national cross cutting issues project made a commitment to include them in the next years plan if they still needed assistance.
There are many Beatrice’s in all urban centres in Rwanda. Unprotected sex is still rampant especially among commercial sex workers and poor vulnerable women. While most HIV/AIDS programs and awareness messages target almost all classes of people in society, a special focus on high risk categories such as Beatrice’s is more urgent now more than ever before. There is need to deal with them as special cases and reaching out with compassion to a class of people who consider themselves and by society as outcasts.
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