The impact of HIV is not just physical. Tearfund and The Metro have returned from Cambodia with stories of the stigma, fear and rejection suffered by those carrying the disease. And also of what Tearfund partners are doing to bring hope in despair.
Photos: Keiran Dodd/Tearfund
‘Only my friends know that I am HIV positive. I don’t want others to know. If they know then they may not want to play with me.’
Sokchan is nine years old and HIV positive. He lives with his fifty-year-old mother Vein in a village about 40km from Phnom Penh.
In September 2005 Sokchen's father died of AIDS. With the help of Tearfund partner World Relief, Vein then decided to get tested and when she received confirmation that she was HIV positive she felt hopeless and afraid.
Sokchan was also tested in 2006. He was only six at the time. He was sick and coughing and at first they suspected pneumonia or TB but these not confirmed.
World Relief’s Hope programme helped them get tested and have supported the family with counselling - a vital part of helping people come to terms with what being HIV positive means.
Sokchen didn’t really understand when he was confirmed HIV positive and would ask why other children wouldn’t play with him. He would sit alone and cry by himself. ‘They would curse my mother,’ he says. ‘I didn’t respond or curse them back, only cry.’
But now he has friends at school. They know he is infected but they don’t say anything. Another child in the class is also HIV positive.
Sokchan is on a strict regime of ARV (anti-retroviral) treatment. World Relief have given him an alarm clock to ensure he takes medicine at 6am and 6pm every day. And thanks to the ARVs he's been taking since 2006, Sokchan’s health seems to have improved in the last year.
But his mother is not so well and is often very weak and dizzy.
‘I worry about my children,’ she says. ‘I still feel responsible for three of them. I worry that if I die no one will take care of my children. I am afraid too.’
Vein is a Christian and is in a support group that World Relief calls a community ‘buddy network’ for all ages among the rural communities where they work. The support group provide her with food and drink and they also share problems together.
Her husband is a labourer. He repairs houses and roofs. Often he would be away from home – for a month at a time – trying to find work. People in the community would tell Vein that her husband had other women. He was indifferent about HIV and didn’t stick to his ARV treatment.
Although her education is very limited - just some reading ability. Under the Pol Pot regime she was unable to go to school. Her husband was recruited into the Khmer Rouge as a child soldier at 16. He was taken to the mountains to train and only returned five years later.
‘It was a very difficult time with nothing to eat,’ she recalls. ‘I had to walk a long way to find food to eat.’ She says that her two elder sisters were murdered by the regime because they were too educated. They were tied up and killed just outside the village. She was 18 at the time. ‘I pretended to be very ignorant and pretended not to understand.’
‘My husband saw them taken away but says he didn’t see them murdered. He remained in denial. It has been a very hard life, we didn’t talk about the war.'
Many previous child soldiers still deny involvement.
But today Vein has hope. ‘Now I can dress myself, I have food to eat and my children can go to school,’ says Vein. ‘I dream that I am stronger and my children will be healthy and have a good education.’