Baglung’s brave women overcome stigma to prevent AIDS | Feature

KISHOR RIMAL

TAKES COURAGE: Sita Pathak, her daughter and Devi Pathak with fellow activist Sitaram Thapa. Sita and Devi are both HIV positive, and have overcome social stigma to spread awareness among Baglung's women about AIDS prevention.
Baglung is called the 'District of Lahures'. It has more migrant workers in proportion to the population than any other district in Nepal. In villages after villages between Baglung and Beni, houses are shuttered up, and there are only women, the elderly and children to be seen.

The Baglung district administration estimates that 65 per cent of the young men in the district live and work in Qatar or Malaysia. They send home an estimated Rs140 million a year in remittances excluding the amount workers in India and soldiers in the Indian Army send home.

But there is more than just cash coming back to Nepal, they are also bringing home HIV and infecting their wives. Although the Midwestern hill districts of Achham and Doti are worse off because of the higher proportion of unskilled workers in India, the epidemic is spreading in Baglung as well.

Sita Pathak of Balewa in Baglung was happy when her husband moved to India. He came home for holidays and brought back his earnings, but she only realised later that he had also infected her with HIV. By the time she got her test, it was too late.

Her husband died three years ago and despite the stigma, Sita has now turned into an activist to help spread awareness to other women like her whose husbands work abroad. Similarly, Devi Pathak was also infected by her husband who works in India. Upon discovery, she contemplated suicide but now like Sita, she has dedicated herself to helping others like her.

Sita and Devi work with a local AIDS awareness group that has 70 members, of whom 50 were infected by husbands working in India. At least five of the women were infected by husbands who worked in the Gulf.

"Stigma and ostracisation means that it takes a lot of courage to come out openly to admit they have HIV," says Sitaram Thapa, who works with the AIDS awareness group which works with prospective migrant workers, with their families back home in Nepal and with the general population.

On the main street of Burtibang village there are only old men and women and children on the streets. "If there were jobs here, they wouldn't have left," says 70-year-old Santosh Pun, whose only son went to India to work as a porter and never returned. He was diagnosed as a HIV positive and died last year.

Pun's eyes glisten as he tells us: "I have lost my son, but whose duty is it to protect the other sons and daughters of Nepal?"