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SAD, SORRY: Graca Machel weeps as
TASO clients gave chilling testimonies yesterday (Photo
by: Charles Opolot) |
By Anne Mugisa
UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Graca
Machel and the UN special envoy on HIV/AIDS, Stephen Lewis,
have criticised the international community for failure to
help end abduction of children by the Lord�s Resistance Army
(LRA) rebels in northern Uganda.
Graca, wife of former
South African president Nelson Mandela, broke down as she
addressed the press at Entebbe over the abductions.
�It is a sense of...I am so sorry. It�s very sad,�
Graca said. Asked whether she would go to the north, she said,
�I�d rather not go because I wouldn�t be in position to make
the difference I would want to make.�
Citing
international meetings and commitments, Lewis described the
child abductions by the LRA as �dispiriting to Machel,
considering all the efforts she has put in.�
Lewis
said they intended to use the Ugandan experience and apply it
in countries severely hit by the pandemic, especially southern
Africa.
He said the flow of the money to fight
HIV/AIDS from the UN will be gradual, but added that some
countries like Rwanda had received half of their allotment.
He said most of the funds would be channelled to
treatment, prevention and care.
He said he was not
sure if Uganda had started getting its share, but promised to
find out from the government.
He said the Clinton
Foundation Fund would also allocate money for the HIV/AIDS
fight soon.
Meanwhile, Machel and other UN officials
also wept as clients at the AIDS Support Organisation (TASO)
gave moving testimonies of their HIV/AIDS situation.
Graca
and Lewis visited TASO and the centre for Prevention of Mother
to Child Transmission (PMTCT).
They were accompanied
to the Mulago TASO and the MTCT centres by the WHO
Representative, Dr. Oladapo Walker and the UNAIDS country
coordinator, Ruben F. del Prado. The clients, who included
people who found out their sero-positive status as far back as
1987, told heart rending stories of how they acquired HIV in
their youth, some of them as school children.
They
told stories of loneliness as employers and family members
segregated them after finding out that they had the AIDS
virus.
They made passionate appeals to the youth to
avoid HIV and for employers to stop discrimination as well as
families to be supportive. They also appealed to the donors to
make the Anti-Retroviral (ARV) drugs affordable so that those
who need them could access them.
The TASO
administrators said there was still need for behavioural
change especially in some of the cultural practices, blamed
for some infections. They cited widow inheritance.
Machel
commended TASO clients and the members of the MTCT for boldly
talking about their situations, saying that they had given
HIV/AIDS a face.
She said outside these centres, many
people are overwhelmed by the disease and they do not know
what to do.
She said by people coming out to talk
about it, the world can see that the disease is not just about
statistics but about real people willing to fight it.
She said Africa needed to shout louder about the
disease.
Ends
Published on: Wednesday, 30th July,
2003 |
