HIV and children

The most difficult issue about HIV is when a child is HIV positive. Its hard because they are so little, they don’t understand WHY they have this disease and since they’ve have it from birth so it was completely out of their control. At AEM they don’t tell a child about their status until they are between 12 and 13 years old. However, as a child you still need to take heavy medicines twice a day to keep up your strength. A woman told me a story today about one of the children at AEM. This little boy was going to primary school and had to take his medicine twice a day. The pills are very hard on the body so you have to take them with food. Also if you take pills at 7 am you take them at 7 pm as well, it is important to keep a strict schedule for them to work well. This little boy’s stomach could not handle the medication early in the morning so the mother was forced to confide in the teacher to make sure the boy took his medication everyday at school. The teacher was more than supportive and asked the boy to come to his office everyday at ten to take his medication. Everything was fine until one of the kids asked why he had to take pills everyday. Since the little boy did not know he was HIV positive, he said he didn’t know what the pills were for only that he took them twice a day. Then one of his friends said “oh my mom is a doctor, rip off the label and I’ll ask her what you have.” So the next day when the little boy went into the office he ripped off the label and gave it to his friend. In Burkina everyone goes home for lunch so as everyone disappeared for lunch the boy went home. However, when he came back to school his friend had discovered that he was taking medication for HIV and told all of his classmates so when he came in to sit down everyone ran away from him. He was shocked when his classmates told him he had HIV because it was the first time he had heard it…he burst into tears and the teacher cancelled class to walk him home. He refuses to go to school now. This is one of the reasons I didn’t focus on children.