People with HIV fight discrimination
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Last May, Devi, not her real name, was surprised when none of the nurses congratulated her after she successfully delivered a baby girl.
"I was really hurt ... they turned the birth of my daughter into a sad moment," said the 25-year-old mother of two, who gave birth to her second child at a state hospital in Jakarta.
She said it was her first real experience of discrimination since learning in March that she had contracted the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) from her husband.
"The nurses were angry with me for giving birth at their hospital and they said they did not want to help me," she recalled.
"In retrospect, I can understand their fears, however, it's still painful because the first people to discriminate against me were supposedly health professionals."
The strong stigmatization associated with the virus has contributed to people being reluctant to report their status to health authorities in this country, according to HIV/AIDS activists.
"For example, the number of official recorded HIV/AIDS cases is only about 7,000, which is utter nonsense," said Zubairi Djoerban, head of the Indonesian AIDS Society (MPAI) and executive director of the University of Indonesia School of Medicine AIDS working group.
The cumulative number of HIV/AIDS cases recorded by the Ministry of Health between April 1987 and June 2005 stood at 7,098, which is far below the ministry's own estimate of up to 150,000 and further below some activists' estimates of nearly 1 million.
The government has said none of the country's 33 provinces is free from the virus.
Zubairi, who documented the first HIV infection in Indonesia in 1986, said that despite the strong AIDS-awareness campaign in recent years, a lot of people still discriminate against those living with the virus.
"People are not evil. They are just ignorant because the government, AIDS activists, teachers, religious leaders and the media have failed to educate the public," he said.
Sri Wahyuningsih, founder of the Pelita Ilmu Foundation, which focuses on AIDS prevention and counseling, said that most people refused to live with HIV-infected people.
"Once people find out they have HIV, they are isolated ... sometimes their houses are pelted with stones and quite often they are told to move to another island," she said. "They are not the only ones affected, their whole family is also isolated by their communities."
Devi, who moved to another area of the country after finding out she had been infected, said she had accepted the fact that her husband transmitted the virus to her and that people would desert her.
"I don't blame anybody for anything," she said. "Blaming people won't cure me ... all I can do is to try to spend the rest of my life doing acts of goodness."
She desperately hopes that her newborn baby, now six weeks old, would be free of the virus.
"My worst fear is that people will think that I no longer exist," she said. "I can deal with it, however, I don't want to see my baby experiencing the same fate." (002)