She fought HIV with courage and is giving hope to others

  Tirupati: Hers is a sad story. She is a village girl. Uneducated. She could have married another villager. Or farmer. Her parents wanted her live in the comforts of a town. They searched for matches and found one. The boy was working in Dharwada in the neighboring Karnataka state as an electrician. He was getting good salary. The parents were glad. The girl, Muniswari was also happy. The boy who came to see her appeared little weak. His parents told them that he was having fever. The marriage was over.

Muniswari went to Dharwar. Soon she discovered that her husband was constantly getting fever. She has taken him to several doctors. The local doctors suspected it to be TB. They have taken him to the super specialty hospital in Raya Vellore in Tamilnadu. There doctors gave some medicines. A nurse secretly told her not to sleep with her husband. She did not understand why she should not.

They came back to their place. Her husband did not keep her aloof. He slept with her. Result was she became pregnant. When she went for tests in the Ruia Hospital in Tirupati, doctors found that she was a HIV patient. She did not know what HIV was. She thought she was suffering from some disease. She was afraid that her husband would leave her if he knew that. She kept her disease a secret. Muniswari’s husband was bed-ridden and after a year of suffering died. Even relatives did not touch his dead body. Some close relations wore plastic covers to lift the pall and take the body to the burial ground.

Muniswari’s real misery started when she went to hospital for delivery. She was put in a segregated ward. Nurses did not touch her. They used to give injections through the iron grill. They frequently used to abuse her in filthy language. Even then she did not quite understand what she was suffering from. She gave birth to a girl. Her in-laws drove her away. She came to her mother’s house with her daughter. She began to slowly understand that she was afflicted with a deadly disease HIV, which has no cure. Neighbors stopped coming to their house. When she went out, they used to quickly run away from her.

Vexed with the life she had, she wanted to commit suicide. One day when she tied a sarry, (a long garment worn by Indian women) to a ceiling fan to hang herself, her mother rushed into the room and slapped her. She placed her child in her lap and told her she must live for that baby.

Muniswari started mustering courage. Luckily for her the child was not affected with AIDS. One day her mother brought a counselor from a voluntary organization working with AIDS patients, who told her not to despair. She said if she lost courage and sulk in self-pity, she would die sooner. She advised Muniswari to join the organization and help in counseling other unfortunate men and women in leading a contended life. She explained that she could get happiness in helping others and lead a life in the service of the unfortunate.

Muniswari joined the organization and started helping others. She has counseled over a thousand HIV patients. Now she is in turn telling them not to leave hope and despair. The organization teaches the uneducated patients and also imparts training in skills, so that they could make toys and other articles through the sale of which, support themselves. She has learned to smile and help others to smile.