Daughter of Charity Testifies at International Aids Meeting

The international site of the Daughters of Charity has an abstract of the testimony shared by Sr. Adelfa Siega (Province of Thailand) during the XVth International HIV-AIDS Conference (July 11-16, 2004, Bangkok, Thailand) upon the request of the organizing committee. Together with Sr. Adelfa, Namtan, a Thai child, also shared the testimony.”…the Sister in charge of the program discovered that there was a small group of elderly persons who were painfully suffering due to HIV/AIDS. Their children had gone to the big cities to earn their living since they harvested rice only once a year. When they came back to the village, they were afflicted with HIV/AIDS. This caused much pain and suffering to their elderly parents. Up until that time, the elderly persons’ children and grandchildren who got infected with the HIV/AIDS virus had no access to the anti-viral medicine and so many of them died. So great were the fear, the stigma and the discrimination surrounding persons with HIV/AIDS that the orphaned children were not accepted in school and the youth could not find jobs once they were known that they came from an HIV/AIDS infected family. The elderly also had great fears about being infected themselves while caring for their sick members. And all these, the elderly suffered in silence.

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