Research day one

Today was my first days of interviews and while I can’t talk specifically about my interviews in detail since they are confidential and this is also on the web which is the opposite of being discrete, so far they are going very well. I must say that I ask very straightforward and blunt questions and have received very straightforward and blunt answers. The women I’ve talked to haven’t held back in one detail when they’ve been asked. Many of them also have children, which is where it becomes painful. One woman I met, who is HIV positive and has also had cervical cancer and has one son that is HIV positive as well. She talked a lot about her son to me. She said directly that had she known he would have been born with HIV, she would have aborted the baby. At school his teacher knows he is HIV positive and will not let him play ball with the other children for fear of contamination. You can see the pain in her face because she was the one who gave it to him, through her breast milk or during birth but she didn’t know she had it herself so there was no way to protect him. I’m only two interviews in of probably 40 or so, and I was almost in tears today….why couldn’t I pick something like sustainable development? Or be a botanist.

In Burkina, because so many people have HIV/ AIDS there is a lot of information about it at school, in hospitals etc. People pretty much all know how to contract it, plus a little extra fear like women wont drink out of the same cup as a woman with HIV…but the majority of ways it is contracted is known, sexual intercourse, breast milk, birth and needles but no one can afford drugs so that’s not an issue here. ARV (Antiretroviral drugs) the drugs that basically allow people with HIV to live a somewhat normal life are also free here. Which is not true in the US or Sweden. The catch however is that these drugs are not always available. And there are different kinds so sometimes you have to wait for your type to come. People reach differently to different types so some women refuse to take certain kinds. Also there are limited NGO like the one I work at AEM where people are taught how to take them. For example you need to take them at the same time everyday and with food. This is another issue, food. Many people in Burkina do not have enough money to sustain a good diet to take these drugs and deal with the side effects. They also do not have the money to see the doctor for the side effects, which occur, head ache, rash, dizziness there are a lot of different side effect but these are some. AEM, again the NGO where I work tries to help out with this, and then these women like I said also have children to feed and school fees and if she is sick all the time and cant work it becomes impossible to keep her family alive.

Stigma is such an issue here that people are terrified someone will find out that they are HIV positive. They are so afraid some of the women in AEM travel for and hour away from their homes to come to this NGO to make sure no one will recognize them from their village. Some of the husbands as well have banned their wives from going in fear that someone will recognize them.

Mirabelle and I talked about it and I think one of these days I’m going to go down to the clinic to get an HIV test, you need one to become a member of my NGO. In Burkina you can get one in 20 minutes not like the two week wait you have in the US or Sweden. The test looks like a plastic PH strip they drop a drop of your blood on it and if there are two lines you have HIV if not you don’t. Like being pregnant, but not. I’m going to go through the procedure to see what they ask women before, because there is a psych evaluation before where they ask you, if you are HIV positive what are you going to do? I guess my answer would be go home…but I don’t have anything to worry about. Other than I’ve heard stories of needles being re-used so I’m going to ask him to open the plastic around the needle in front of me. But these were stories from the 80’s, I’m sure its different now! But if we can’t find a doctor who speaks English, they wont let me take the test with Mirabelle in there obviously, so we will have to see what they do.