HIV campaigner stands in Kenya
2007-12-25 09:06
Nairobi - Inviolata Mmbwavi waited seven years to tell her family she was HIV-positive.
"I wasn't strong enough," said Mmbwavi, wearing a crimson skirt suit with a red Aids ribbon pinned to the lapel. "I didn't believe my results. I thought only promiscuous people caught HIV and I had just had my first boyfriend."
Years later, Mmbwavi, 35, has not only told her parents and friends about her illness, she is running for a parliamentary seat in Kenya's December 27 elections and is making her positive status the centrepiece of her campaign.
"I don't rule out my HIV status can play me down, but I also don't rule out that it can give me credit. I am identifying with the people.
"I can tell them 'I am part of you. We are all infected or affected'," she said.
In a country where about 6% of the population are HIV-positive and where carrying the disease bears an unshakable stigma of immorality and carelessness, Mmbwavi says she is changing the way Kenya views people living with HIV and Aids at the highest level.
Coming out wasn't easy, she insists - her eyes welling up with tears as she reflects on those first few years after she was tested in 1993.
Working as a counsellor at an Aids advocacy group, Mmbwavi was asked in 2000 to speak to parliamentarians about being a young person living with HIV, just after then President Daniel arap Moi declared Aids a national disaster.
It would be the first time she would be so public about her status, and the first time she spoke to MPs in such a formal venue.
Their support did it for me
For an hour, she went on about the stigma she feels; about how she was more frightened to come out about the disease than to die from it.
"They supported me. They encouraged me. That assurance was very comforting. That was the beginning of me not caring any more about my HIV status."
That hour spurred not only a crusade to rid the disease of the perceptions it carries, but inspired a desire to work closer with the government to bring the plight of people living with HIV to the public fore.
Seven years later, after creating her own non-governmental advocacy group that sets at the top of its agenda the empowerment of people living with HIV, she may do just that - if she wins her seat in the upcoming polls.
Mmbwavi is up against 22 candidates in the capital Nairobi's Embakasi constituency, but rather than viewing her health as a setback, she sees it as a way for her constituents to relate to her.
Supporters call her a lioness, saying until now she has defended her constituents - people living with HIV - staunchly.
- SAPA