At a young age, Latifa Nyagawa was desperate and had no income to sustain her life. Both her parents died when she was young, life was difficult. I could serve up to 28 men per week. Now at 22, Latifa who is a resident of Igwechanya village in Njombe region, recalls that she could earn up to Sh per man. The sex work eventually became the only option she had to earn money as sometimes she travelled long distance to look for clients.
At that night, Latifa served her client under a condition that the client would pay her Sh as service fee. He said he would kill me if I continued to disturb him. I cried for help. She further recalls her controversial life and how she ended up in a troubled life, after she first developed black spots on her skin, a sign of HIV infection. This is done by scaling up evidence-based client centered combination biomedical, behavioural and structural HIV prevention, and family services, with strong linkages to care, treatment and other services.
After receiving the testing and counselling service for HIV, Latifa was motivated to undergo testing and the result showed she was HIV positive. I was depressed and I lost hope. Latifa says until today, she has not been able to identify the man who infected her with HIV. In the initial days, it was really challenging for Latifa to access HIV medicine from the hospital. She was smoking cigarrate. I talked to her about importance of HIV testing. To address the stigma among people living with HIV, Jhpiego has embarked on enrolling individual living with the disease in Antiretroviral Treatment ART through outreach services in the community.
He asserted that the burden was attributable to poverty, low literacy levels among parents, peer pressure and harmful cultural practices that expose children to sex early in life. Though Latifa was tested HIV positive, she did not let that stand in her way of changing her life for a better future. It was a blessing in disguise for Latifa. After being diagnosed positive with HIV, Lafita stopped sex work and got opened a pub from her savings.
I can now feed and clothe myself. We both are on ARVs. However, the studies indicate that HIV can pass from a woman with HIV to her child during pregnancy, at the time of birth, or when breast-feeding the infant, hence medical treatment of both the mother and her infant can minimise the chances of that happening.
