I am not an expert on HIV/AIDS in the medical sense and all my articles are written from my personal and family experiences as a family man who has lived with HIV knowingly for over three decades.
I know how it feels to be HIV+, how to raise a girl child born HIV+ from babyhood to adulthood and telling her status at the age of 12 and advising her to get into relationships with men of similar status and if possible get married to such. I know how it feels like to live with a wife for over 18 years doing protected sex thereby foregoing the possibility of having anymore children all for fear of infecting her. I therefore call myself an expert in living with HIV and hence have a lot to teach others how to live positively with HIV.
A lot of children have been and will continue to be born with HIV since the time HIV came onto the scene way back in the mid 1980s. That time when most children born HIV+ would die a few years after birth is gone and we are in a time when it’s now possible to marry a virgin who is HIV+ or a positive young man who has never slept with a woman and still bear HIV- children.
In some families battle lines have been drawn and tensions are high because children born HIV+ only learnt much later and on their own that they were HIV+ when they were already adults and not having any sex.
Most only learnt that their parents infected them at birth after violent confrontations. In this article I shall try to give a step by step method that we used to let our daughter Rutendo born in 1994 know her HIV+ status and how we helped her cope and make informed choices in getting into relationships and finally getting married.
Today she is married to an HIV+ man and they have been blessed with three boys all HIV-. Rutendo has never been admitted into hospital for any illness except for caesarian operations when giving birth.
When our daughter who is our second and last born child was born in 1994 my wife, Mai Simba and myself were not yet aware that we were HIV+ and were both enjoying excellent health. Everything was going on very well untill 1999 when I was admitted at St Luke’s Hospital suffering from Tuberculosis (TB) for over 3 months. I later tested HIV+ while undergoing TB treatment and only disclosed to Mai Simba in 2003 when I was almost recovered from TB and she declined to be tested when I asked her to hence the need for protected sex for the next 18 years.
Meanwhile our daughter’s health took a downward dive from the time she began school around 2002 .She was always looking sickly and we unsuccessfully tried everything we could then to help her recover her previous good health.
In 2006 we made the bold move to take her for an HIV test which came out positive and boy, were we shocked, we were devastated as we grappled with how we were going to deal with this new phenomenon. Soon Mai Simba had regained her usual composure and took everything in good stride declaring that we would not let Rutendo know her results yet. She was put on a cotrimoxazole course which was the standard medicine for most HIV+ people then. We had to wait up to 2012 for Rutendo to know her HIV+ status meanwhile her health improved greatly due to the cotrimoxazole she was taking.
In 2012 Rutendo asked to go and be tested with four of her friends at Mkoka Clinic our local clinic of choice. We talked over it with Mai Simba and we agreed to let her go but with her mother and not with her friends. We had to prepare her fully because we already knew her status so we wanted her to be ready to accept her results. I was already on ART having begun ART in 2010. She was the one responsible for my ART taking and making sure that I did so on time.
We drilled her on many issues to do with her decision to get tested and when we were sure she was ready and prepared, off they went to the clinic and the results came as we now all know and after all the counselling coupled with the extra input of the clinic she came back looking very depressed and gloomy. I had to work on her to boost her morale asking her to take a leaf from me and move on with life as if nothing was wrong.
Her mother tried her best and soon she began to accept her new status and soon she was her jovial self again. She was soon initiated on ART and she tasked me with the duty of being her time keeper which I gladly accepted and am still her time keeper and remind her to take her tablets on time every morning and she does the same to me from Mutare where she lives with her family.
Time came when Rutendo was now a big girl and we knew she would soon get into relationships.We agreed to sit down with her and school her properly on how to go about it. I personally told her that there were lots of youngmen out there HIV+ like her and that these were the people she should get into relationships with. We told her the dangers and embarrassments of falling in love and getting married to HIV negative men later on in life. I am happy to say she listened and later on got married to an HIV+ youngman with whom she has 3 boys all HIV-.
Knowledge is power and all children born HIV+ have got a right to know their HIV positive statuses in time so that they make informed choices about their lives. Parents also need to show remorse and apologise to their children for bringing them into the world already infected. Children of apologetic parents should learn to accept their parents’ apologies so that life moves on normally and in harmony. In my case having brought the HIV home I had to apologize to both Mai Simba and Rutendo and they have accepted my apologies and here we are a very happy family enjoying life like every other family. My family is very comfortable having me talking and writing about them in my articles . Readers should never feel sorry for us for being HIV+ because we have no regrets and are enjoying very good health and making the best out of this our God given time.
Piason Maringwa
+263774322043
